Busy, busy, busy.

We got out relatively early this morning, and stopped in with my cousin, Arlynne. She's famous in the family for not cooking; however, today she made her mother's kugel recipe! Tasted great, to boot! We shmoozed for a while with the crowd there of her friends, and then wandered off.

First, forestcats realized that we were very close to a Penzey's spices store, and we managed to find it, right next to a BevMo in Torrance. We dropped some cash at each, though not outrageous amounts, in restocking the spice cabinet with some things that we'd used up, and others to try.

Then, instead of heading home, we stopped in Buena Park to eat at Portillo's, a chain restaurant from the Chicago suburbs that opened at this site, and one other in the Greater Los Angeles area, selling Italian beef sandwiches, Chicago Red Hots, and other fare as hearty and tasty as the food they serve back in the Midwest. I usually have a hot dog or a beef sandwich, but they were bragging about their hamburgers, and I did have a hankering for one. My favorite local burger is from Fatburger; this burger is comparable, except that I like the Portillo's bun better. Wow.

Home; laundry, after I finish with puttering on the computer.

Maybe some TV off the DVR.

Sewing circle today was quite productive for me.

I started out by raiding Helwig's silk weaving thread supplies and made candy cane striped strings for the coif and forehead cloth set. Worked beautifully.

Then I started on setting in the sleeves in my new layton jacket, and by the time I was finishing the second one off, topstitching and all, it was twenty to midnight!

Breaking it down a little further, I started by cutting down the front half of the armscyes equally on both sides, then produced two wings.

I had not brought a pattern for the wings, so I just winged it (he he he). I measured on the armscye and decided the wings would work at a length of 40 cm, then I pulled out the scraps of cloth I had left and made up the pattern on the fabric and copied it on the lining. The shape is a circle segment, 40 cm long and about 7 cm wide in the middle, narrowing down to 2 cm at the ends.

They are made up by putting right sides together and stitching along the straight edge and up the very short sides. Then I turned them inside out and topstitched for a neat finish, which means the curved edge is left raw and open and ready to be inserted between the layers of the armscye.

Actually what I did at assembly was line up the middle of the wings with the middle of the top half of the sleeves and letting the wing curve along the top of the sleeves as far as they would go - which is about four fifths of the circumference. Before inserting this assembly between the shell and lining I turned in a seam allowance of the shell fabric and attached the sleeve and wing by topstitching from the right side through all layers (minus the jacket lining). Then to finish the inside of the jacket I smoothed down the lining and folded in a seam allowance to just hide the line of stitching.

Left to do now on the new jacket is: finish neckline, front opening and lower hem; sort out front closing mechanism, and finally stitch on decorative satin bands.

Two valiums + rum/diet coke = my new favorite way to fly through highly bumpy weather.

We could have done cart wheels through the air and I wouldn't have cared.
In fact, I wish we did. Damn wussy pilots.

So, yea, thumbs up on that!


Except it's now 5pm and I'm finishing up my work. So I had to rush from the airport straight to work.

I'm loopy, I'm fuzzy, I'm probably looking pretty rough and just sooooooooooooooooooo veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery slleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy.


z

Well, this is frustrating. The Open University beginners' German course is way too simple. The intermediate course is way too complicated. Dammit, why don't they have a "Did okay in GCSE German but that was a long time ago" course?

ETA: And, for added fun, if I do the Certificate in German, I get most of my course fees paid but I have to do both beginner and intermediate German. However, the next beginner course doesn't start for A YEAR. Wonder if I could do the intermediate before the beginner? *g*

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No slush stats today! But Query Project is still going strong.

I've made a couple small changes to the "how to submit" section, mostly just removing agency things, but it's probably time for a good revision on that. Anything you think I need to address eventually?

My comments are in [brackets] . As always, I haven't read these yet. These are my reactions as I read them.

--

#29 (Pretty sure I've read this one.)

Dear Jodi,

Shayla Carver, undercover agent and master assassin, has killed many times. That's what assassins do. Nothing to lose sleep over. [I was good until this sentence. It's not bad, it's just redundant. I think if we haven't got the idea by now, we're not going to and another sentence isn't going to help. ;)] But this mission is different; she's never killed a whole planet before. [Super idea. I feel like this sentence should be snappier, though. Maybe it's the first phrase I don't like.]

She's seen it happen though, many years ago, when her own home burned on the orders of a young Emperor. The young Shayla watched, helpless but incensed, and vowed revenge.

How many youngsters [This word seems out of place here. Also note the word repetition. Two "young"s in the last paragraph, and "youngster" here.] dream the impossible? And how many think of the consequences? Shayla did more than dream. She started on a long road, a road which she's followed without question, a road which has finally brought her to the Emperor's palace and within reach of her goal. [Not big on the repetition here. The road image isn't strong or unique enough to deserve it. ]

Shayla has planned everything meticulously, except that she hasn't allowed for coming face to face with some of the two billion inhabitants she's about to slaughter. Ordinary people. Not the stereotyped strutting Imperials of her imagination, and not so readily dismissed as legitimate targets or collateral damage. And then there's the Emperor himself. An ordinary man with troubles and dreams of his own. Not the kind of man Shayla can picture giving such an order.

Now she's starting to lose sleep. [On one hand, I think this is really strongly showing your writing style, which is awesome. On the other hand, while the stylistic repetitions might be okay in the story, it's making the query a bit wordy.]

As she enslaves the destructive might of the Emperor's own fleet and launches the final stage of her plan, Shayla can no longer ignore the enormity of what she's doing. On the brink of success, she must choose: To complete her lifelong goal to rid humanity of a corrupt regime, or to heed her own misgivings and trust the man, her sworn enemy, that she's spent so many years pursuing. [There are some super awesome conflicts in this, and you've done a nice job of showing your writing style. I worry that the strong ideas are getting lost under the words, though.]

"Ghosts of Innocence" is a science fiction novel complete at 95,000 words. I am also working on a sequel, "The Ashes of Home". Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Ian Bott

--

#30 (I think I've read this one too. Whoa.)

Dear Jodi:

The details of how it came to be are lost to history, [*flail* It. Please give a proper noun. I want to be grounded right away.] but in the third century, a female shaman or sorceress was the first ruler of a substantially unified Japan. [Is this the "it"? The fact of a female shaman ruling Japan? Okay, that does make my request for a proper noun more difficult.] The YA novel for which I am seeking representation, Making the Sorceress Queen, is my attempt to imagine who she was and how she came to power. [Cool. Slip in a little subtle conflict? "things she overcame to achieve her power" or something?]

The tale is told the voice of the queen's younger brother, Po, [I can see this either working really well, or steal the focus from the queen. Either way, I suspect it's very difficult to do.] who aids in his sister Io in her transformation from country orphan to regional monarch. The siblings flee their home in northern Honshū when their father, a provincial ruler, is assassinated. [I assume they're fleeing because of the assassination and they have reason to believe they're next...] They take with them Po's extraordinary dog, Honschi, and their father's warhorse, Chara, at a time when horses are a rarity in Japan. After some years in hiding, they arrive in Kyūshū, where Io [Is this the future queen? This is the first time we've seen her name.] begins the delicate political dance of playing local rulers off against one another in order to further her own goals. She is a magnificent warrior and a brilliant tactician, and knows how to inspire devotion and fear to help complete her conquest. In her rare vulnerable moments, she is also a young woman deeply scarred by the loss of her parents. Po is one of the few people she can trust, and perhaps the only one who may be able to help her find a measure of peace to go with her power. [I think this one has some good stuff in it, and it's not a subject we've read about a million times. But I also feel it's missing stakes and conflicts. What happens if Io doesn't become queen? What's keeping her from achieving this goal?]

Making the Sorceress Queen is complete at 64,000 words, 200 pages, and sixteen chapters. [We don't need anything after the wordcount. Page count and chapter count means very little.] The novel blends elements that will be familiar to readers of historical fiction, fantasy, and that adolescent classic, the boy-and-dog story. For myself, I was once a fifth-grade teacher, and am presently a graduate student in English literature. I have studied fiction writing with Jim Shepard and Nicholas Delbanco. My short fiction for adults has appeared in The Connecticut Review and is forthcoming in Rosebud. I am also a martial artist, an equestrian, and the owner of the Japanese Akita dog who served as the model for Honschi. Thank you very much for your time and consideration of this manuscript.

Sincerely,

Carolyn J. Dekker

--

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A few days ago, I read Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin. Even though it was stuffed with plot holes you could drive the Titanic through, the annoyance that has stuck with me?

The Leviathan itself.

This ship is supposedly the ultimate in technology and luxury in 1878. And yet its technology is forty years out of date.

It's a paddle steamer, ffs. By 1878, nobody was building ocean-going paddle steamers! The inherent problem of a paddle steamer in rough seas is that the wheels come out of the water and the ship ends up zigzagging all over the place. Adding masts and sails can help keep the ship level (although the Leviathan is apparently rigged as a ship, suggesting that Akunin really doesn't grasp the purpose of the sails on an ocean-going paddle steamer) but the screw propeller was mastered thirty years earlier and is a hell of a lot more efficient.

Also, this ship provides maids and valets for the passengers, so they don't have to bother travelling with their own staff. (Thus neatly restricting the pool of possible suspects. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THAR.) I'm not sure what the passengers are meant to do when they arrive in Calcutta...

Grar, sulk, historical accuracy, author's needs shouldn't influence reality, etc, etc.

Also, I keep forgetting that Merlin's on so early and then I MISS IT.

people have commented at http://derryderrydown.dreamwidth.org/1402491.html.

I've had a few friends asking about gifts for the Sprog. mjolnir1964 had the right line the other day, suggesting cardboard boxes.

Just wrap an old, worn-out cardboard box in a few layers of colorful, easy-to-tear paper. Shredding paper and taking apart aged cardboard is by far his favorite pastime at the moment. Hours of enjoyment. He is truly the son of a line of Bohemian stone-masons, for he loves to make little 'uns out of the big 'uns.

One could tell that I was getting some rest, yesterday, in that by today, I finished not one, not two, but three books.

First was a wonderful travel/geography/history book about China, called The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester. Delightful, and recommended.

The others were both from the Osprey Men-At-Arms series of illustrated books. The first that I finished was #395: Tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, which gave a much clearer picture to me of their history and status, which I found very interesting.

The last was #396: Medieval Scandinavian Armies (1): 1100 - 1300, a period of time following that of the Vikings, which gave me some insight into the differences of the history of the region. Not bad.

After a long time on the computer, catching up from two days worth of material, I spent most of the rest of daylight on doing dishes after the Thanksgiving fun. I'm happy to say that at least one person helped by doing the silverware after the feast, for which I give thanks. I still have a couple of pieces of cookware that didn't make themselves known to me when I was initially working, but I'll catch up, probably today.

I also hung up the new clothing that forestcats found on her Black Friday perambulations. She got several useful pieces, some for me, and some for herself.

As there wasn't much we wanted to watch on TV, we settled in the living room after dark, and I put on a couple of Netflix discs worth of DVDs, so we watched Hellboy II, which was better than any of the previous Hellboy material I've watched, and then followed that with another disc of Connections 2, which was, again, better than the previous disc. Nice.

Wonderful wind that makes the wires moan. I was walking under them--they were swaying and making ghostly sounds. In the white pines, the wind was hissing. In the bare trees, it was singing out waves and surf. It was flinging first one handful and then another of black birds into and across the sky--like pepper.

New on Amazon wish lists (those of others): "Buying this gift elsewhere?" If you decide to buy something that is on someone's Amazon wish list other than from Amazon you can reserve it, so others looking at the wish list will know. Nice.

I know that there have been several posts on this site about Cotehardies, however I have some rather specific concerns.

I wish to make a cotehardie for an upcoming Twelfth Night. I have searched and, from previous discussions on this blog, have visited the sites of CotteSimple, DameHelen and Robin Netherton.

My questions/concerns are: I'm a big girl, I"m a 52-H in the chest, and wear a normal/mundane size of 24/26 pants. Is there anyone on this list that is close to these sizes that wear cotehardies? I know that most medieval clothing was designed to fit the wearer, not mass produced to fit everyone, so things are more tailored. But I still have some concerns and would like some feedback from anyone of similar size. Which of the above sites has the best pattern for a larger girl? I am leaning toward CotteSimple, but if anyone has found that I should use another pattern let me know!

For those wanting to know. I want to do the layered versions with a white linen under and a lovely blue wool over.

Any and all help is appreciated.

Thank you,

Amanda

I have nothing interesting or useful to say, so I bring you this, recently spotted on splodefromcute.



This kitten has epic fierce. Also, jazz paws.

You don't necessarily need sound, but you might need a high-pressure cute suit. I have watched it about ten times and I can't not smile every time.

Life is meaningless and full of pain.

Suddenly it seems a thousand years ago when the G-Men were 5-0 and dominating. What the hell happened? Clearly I can't leave the country during football season. My teams just seem to fall apart without me.