hwaet

So, I finished that short story. It's maybe the best I've ever written. We'll see if the editors agree. I have this superstition that I am jinxing it by even mentioning it here, now, before the verdict comes back. I am prepared for the statistical probability. I am hoping for otherwise. Thus it goes with all submissions.

I get a little tired of hearing 'think positively' from people when I cheerfully announce that I'm sending something off for rejection. I am thinking positively. I am positive that I am better than 95% of the other stuff out there. Maybe even higher. But with rejection rates even higher than that, and personal taste to account for, well, there we go. If I didn't think positively, I wouldn't keep doing this.

With the story done, and nothing to comment on from my 60 students this weekend (the flood will arrive on the morrow, unless I get some ambitious early birds today), I am at loose ends. Making granola. Got a sleeve to knit...which I am avoiding, because I don't really like how the first sleeve turned out, and if this one turns out the same way, I will have to go modify the damned pattern and redo two sleeves.

The upside: the way winter's acting on this coast, I won't actually be able to wear the sweater until next year anyway, so no rush.

Idris discovered my yarn. I keep partial skein/balls and projects in two big popcorn tins under the coffee table. He cannot squeeze himself into the tins, but he can dip one skinny arm into them, fish around for Something Cool (tm), and haul it out. Now there are lids on the tins. So far he's igoring the projects ON the table (see above: sleeves). Louhi used to pick a single DP out of a project--never the stitches, just the loose needle still stuck in the ball--and run off to play with it. I am grateful to the yarn gods that Idris hasn't picked up that habit...although one of my 7 DPNs has acquired what looks like gnaw-marks on one end.

 So on that note, I leave you with a shot of the stage from the Amon Amarth show last night (which was crazy-fun, despite the fact I inhaled enough second hand smoke to make my own smog cloud). That's Johan Hegg in the corner, bellowing at the crowd.

losing metal points, and elk

I spent three hours in the kitchen this afternoon. I made kale salad and curry meatballs, which involves a lot of chopping the same thing for both dishes. Carrots. Apples. Onions. And then, for variety, a leek! Crazy times. I never thought of apples as something for cooking (except for desserts) before I got my Scandinavian cookbook, even though I knew about "cooking apples." I thought they meant for pie. Now I am looking for things to which I can add apples. The good part of three hours in the kitchen is I have enough meatballs for 4 separate meals for the pair of us. And I have enough kale salad for a herd of wildebeests, which means the pair of us will be eating a lot of that this week. But it's kale. It's a superfood! And we both like it, which is rare and wonderful for greens. Usually we just suck it up and eat the damn things because They Are Good For Us(tm).

 Anyway. This cookbook is responsible for both kale salad and meatballs. Shan got it for us last Yule, and it's pretty damn awesome. I count three Viking/Scandinavian cookbooks in our possession, not counting the æbelskiver cookbook (which Shan also got for me. Do we sense a theme?). I intend to add the Nordic Diet to our collection this year. Anyway, with the exception of aforementioned æbelskiver, all of the cookbooks include game meat. Elk. Moose. Venison. Reindeer. (oh, Donner!) We count ourselves fortunate if we can find bison around here (yes, but only at Whole Foods). So we were pretty happy when we stopped at the local Sprouts on Friday (because we walk through grocery stores for fun) and found ground venison, wild boar(!), and elk. From New Zealand, mind, but whatever. We stood there for 10 minutes debating the merits of which to buy, and settled on the elk. And it, along with a package of bison, went into the meatballs. Yes, you can tell a difference. Elk's a super dark-red meat, not much fat. I haven't had it since I was a kid, when my dad shot one and brought it home (we lived in South Dakota at the time, and I wanted so badly to go hunting with him; but my mother decreed it too cold for me to go with him. I think it was because I was a little girl, and not a little boy). Anyway, Dad shot this elk and brought her home and hung her carcass in the front yard from the tree and butchered her. He'd skinned and dressed her already; this was the sawing into pieces part of the process. I remember vividly the sound the saw made going through her spinal column. I remember the texture of her muscles in their little sheath of viscera. I watched him butcher her and bring her pieces inside. My mother was Profoundly Unhappy(tm) with the color of the meat, but she cooked it. I remember loving the elk chili. I also remember getting violently ill shortly thereafter, and blaming the elk (unfairly). I wish we could get elk steak, but I'm pretty happy to've found it at all. If I make sausage stuffing this winter, I'll definitely use the wild boar stuff. I'm curious if there's as marked a difference between wild pig and domestic as there is between tame cow and bison.

But the whole point of this post was how I entertained myself while doing the megacookathon. Lady Gaga (newly acquired from the Rat). Dude. I lost so many metal points.  Nous says I am more metal not giving a damn how unmetal Gaga is than if I didn't listen to her because it's not metal. ...because, as we all know, I sit around worrying about whether or not I am sufficiently metal.

Anyway. I think it's appropriate to make a two-meat meatballs while rocking out to the chick who wore a meat dress to the VMAs last year. Well. I like to think I was rocking out, but I know me, and I know how I look when I dance, and I am hoping like hell the solid sheet of rain outside kept any neighbors from seeing that performance.

l'été est arrivé

So I'm reading my Yoga Journal this afternoon, after having done a little yoga, waiting for the korma to do its thing in the slow cooker (customarily, we say that it's cooking), and I came across an article on the most yoga-friendly cities in the US. To my total non-shock, Boulder was on the list. There was a little article about the town, the yoga it offers, its general population. And there were pictures. And I recognized those places. I recognized Pearl Street and the new-to-me-but-old-now renovations, the rock-bridge going up the middle of the street.

And I surprised myself. Had a little  tears-prickling-behind my eyes feeling, and an acute pain in my chest. Embarrassing, gods, I don't cry; I have a little chip of ice where my heart should be, and it pushes slush through my veins. Ask my students. They know. But seriously. I was homesick. Still. After damn near 7 years here, I miss there.

I never reckoned, as a child of the Air Force's cruel whims, to get attached to a place. We never lived in one more than 3 years until I was 12. I spent high school in the same town, and my parents still live there; but my home, the place I chose to go and spend 13 years of my life, is Boulder. 20-odd square miles surrounded by reality. Oz. Berkeley with fewer Californians (but only barely). Expensive little town, with high taxes voted in by people with the money to preserve their open spaces and their zoning laws. Well. Expensive by Colorado standards; the OC has violently readjusted my notions of cost and value. Pedestrian and bike friendly. Working public transportation. Pine trees and oak and maple and the foothills and the canyons. And winter. Wind. Snow. Sometimes thunder while the snow falls. The air is dry and thin, although wetter than a lot of places along the front range. The sun is out most days, sometimes brittle and cold, sometimes too close and too hot. And the mountains--gods, the mountains. Right. There.

I planned to love SoCal. I did. I came out here determined to want to live here forever and mourn bitterly when we moved away. I planned to love the sea, the sand, the everything except the traffic and how bad could that really be, anyway? Hell, baking would be normal again! Water would boil at the right temperature! And no scraping the car in the winter.

Okay. That last thing is pretty cool. There are a lot of good things about living in greater Los Angeles. I can, on a good day, make a list. But it's not Boulder. And those things can't make up for what's missing.

One of the things I miss about LJ is the what's-playing-now feature, like the mood thingie, only cooler. My mood is generally evident from my prose. But my music! Not so much.

So in the vein of missing that feature, what's playing now is Amorphis, "My Kantele," the version off Magic and Mayhem. It's about how people who say the kantele (which is an instrument, kinda like a guitar and a dulcimer had a transporter accident) was made by the gods, fashioned out of the great pike's bones and guts, are liars. The kantele is sorrow. It is grief. It is wounds and suffering. It's a little more intense a sorrow than homesickness. But the point is--the kantele is a Finnish instrument, and the grimness of the song comes from a people shaped by a land with a thousand lakes, scraped out by glaciers; a place that sees a lot of winter, and long summer days. It's a song about the shape and stamp place leaves in a person's soul.

Gods, I want to go home.

finnish metal

 So we braved the drive into L.A. last night to go see the Finnish Metal Tour at the Key Club. I suppose I should feel all properly Angelino, now, having attended a show at such a famous venue. Alas! I am not hip enough to give a damn. I was happiest that the parking was under $10, and close, and that there was a kick-ass pizza place down the street that made calzones the size of a football (seriously). It's probably famous, too; there were many famous people's signatures on the walls. But I don't care about that, either, because the calzone was good. So there.

Finnish metal did not, alas, include Amorphis, but there were parts of old!Amorphis in Barren Earth, and parts of Moonsorrow and Swallow the Sun, as well. Recipe for win! And I loved them live exactly as much as I love them recorded. They're also a poor fit for the LA crowd of bouncy jaded can-I-mosh-to-this metalheads, being doomy and dark and melodic and...okay, I was going to say "talented" but that's not exactly fair. L.A. recognizes talent just fine; it just values flash a lot more, and Barren Earth is not flashy. Still. They were my favorites. They were also the first band (after the competent opening local act), so between them and Finntroll we had a couple hours of other bands--not exactly killing time, because that's not fair, but not as pumped up for them. But bonus! Vreth from Finntroll was wandering the crowd, and ended up spending Rotten Sound's set talking to the VIPs not 5 feet from me. If you don't know why that's a good thing, google him. Assuming you are inclined to slim dark long-haired men, you will see why I approved of his proximity.

And let me just add, as an aside, that I love how the bands do wander the crowds before and after their sets, and sometimes hang out at the merch tables. You can talk to them. They talk back. Or at least--you can wave and mouth "Good show!" or flash them horns or whatever, and they acknowledge and wave back.

I wanted to like Ensiferum, and I guess I did, musically, on their own merit (female keyboardist for the win!)--but their crowd was peppered with baby skinheads (and one elder skinhead), which was distracting. I get that so-called Viking metal appeals to the white power dipshits, but I always depressed when I see those people, especially the young ones, especially in a place like L.A. where 'but I've just never met anyone besides white folks' is not an excuse, and especially-especially when they're sharing a pit with non-white folks who love the same band. I share my spouse's disappointment in universal justice: the refrigerator-sized Mexicans should have crushed the baby skinheads in the pit, but they didn't. Possibly because the baby skinheads were staying near the edges (where we were, letting us get a nice eyeful of their crappy little hate-filled tattoos) and avoiding the middle of the pit itself. The elder skin had no such fear, however, and was more violent than necessary in the pit itself. Doubly vexing: the elder skin, who had to be north of my age by a good handful or so, had a massive Thor's hammer on his (massive) chest, and an Odin scowling out from between his shoulder blades. Fuck you, dude. May Hunin and Mugin feast on your eyes.

[allow me to wax briefly shallow: I appreciate that it's hot in the pit, and I get that taking one's shirt off is some expression of manliness, fine, and I know most men are athletes and that some men have...more fur...than others.  But knowing and seeing are two different things, and I'd as soon skip the second thing, kthxbai.]

Anyway, the skinhead sightings made Nous very grumpy. They made me very grumpy, too, but he has an extra special hate for them. I was glad that they all left, like roaches scattering from the light, before Finntroll came on. And Finntroll rocked. Their crowd was nearly as frenzied, if a touch smaller; and it was skinhead free.  There were more asshats, though...the sort who are big bulky men, easily three of me, shoving into spaces meant for people half my size who then use me as the padding between their asses and the metal rails as they hold back the pit. I did not appreciate that, and I have sharp elbows. Asshat found somewhere else to go, and after that it was screaming and jumping around and destroying my voice for teaching today. But no pit! I am too wise for pits. Moshers are too much like zombies for my tastes. Hairy, sweaty, bigger-than-me zombies.

Anyway, I am pretty sure my afternoon Ashtanga class is going to kill me.