Thanksgiving Dinner today at Animal Acres farmed animal sanctuary in Acton, CA. It was catered by One World Vegetarian Cuisine. So yummy! Even better I got to spend the afternoon giving belly rubs to pigs, feeding alfalfa to cows, and celebrating Turkeys!

http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63653/Cranberry-Orange-Bread

Cranberry Orange Bread - Dense and sweet, almost dessert like, this Quick Bread recipe has a light citrus flavor and a lotta flavor.

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63652/Cats-Tongues

Cats' Tongues

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63651/Christmas-Opera-Cake

Christmas Opera Cake - In a slight twist to the traditional Opera the Chestnut cream and Brandy syrup give this recipe a Christmassy feel.

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Our Evening Meal

Quorn bolognase with lots of veg on brow pasta. Healthy, and not at all trashy.

Apple WIN pudding: Two large apples cooked down to moosh with a bit of cinnamon and ginger. Toast some (own brand) oats with a lot of brown sugar. Mix. Enjoy! Not trashy except for the apples.

Trashed up posh hot chocolate: dark hot chocolate with half a tsp of chilli powder. Top with marshmallows, then cream, then broken up chocolate. Gooey melty sticky yumness!

Choco mallow non squares: put remaining marshmallows and chocolate in bowl. Microwave. Mix in own brand rice crispies. Eat while warm!

Bye bye diet :D

Originally published at pixels, light and hot wax. You can comment here or there.

It has been crazy busy at Casa Jeliza — mostly doing lots and lots of post-processing for ye old day jobbe.

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I just got e-mail notification that my box is back from Windycon …. 10 minutes after returning from my pobox.

Dangit. And I am suddenly not sure if want to see what is inside, anyway.

ETA: Nope, shouldn’t have looked. I don’t like receiving heavy boxes back from shows. *sigh*

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In more post-worthy news, I finally was able to make it to a life drawing session, which was a very welcome return. My not-so-mad skillz have definitely atrophied a bit in the interim, but not as much as I had feared. And something about having my hands straight-up filthy with charcoal just makes me happy. The model was a bit on the wobbly side (new to figure modeling), and had sadly uninteresting shoulders, though part of that was the my angle on the pose. (I could draw shoulders for days normally, I have no idea why.) Here are two of my favorites (these are quick snaps, not proper shots, or I’ll never get around to posting them…)

We stopped by to visit my folks today, then took the back way home to avoid construction on the freeways. That put us going by the rose fields on the west side of Phoenix. Eric stopped the car so we could all inhale for a bit, and so I could snap this picture.

Is this not a perfect example of what art teachers call the vanishing point? If you ever want to learn to draw in perspective, this would be a great spot to set up your easel!

I've just ordered tea samples from 2 online suppliers. It's one of the things I do when the winter closes in. Except for the Korakundah Estate tea, these are all 1 ounce samples. From Upton tea we have

Sacher Blend
New England Harvest Blend
Pai Mu Tan "Grapefruit"

From Chado Tea I have

Wild Monkey Marsala
Kenilworth Estate Kandy OP
Keemun Mao Feng
Rooibos Campfire
Korakundah Estate Organic FOP

If you followed the links, you'll note that all of them except the Pai Mu Tan are black teas, with added flavors. I actively dislike oolong and I'm sort of 'meh' about green teas. (If anyone has a truly excellent green tea to suggest, I'd be happy to hear about it.) The Pai Mu Tan is a white tea with grapefruit flavoring added. I'm just starting to learn about white tea. The tea house down the street has a white chai that I really like.

I like flavored teas. High quality teas with mostly natural flavorings that is. Some of the cheap artificially flavored things are really awful. I'm a sucker for chais of all sorts. Chado has a lot of them and I have all of theirs I think. As I believe I mentioned before, though, I like my chais without milk and sugar. I'm a real sucker for anything flavored with spices and for most citrus fruit flavorings. I'm currently drinking my first pot of the Upton New England Harvest Blend. It's a bit of a disappointment because none of the apple, cinnamon, almond, or vanilla flavors are coming through very much. I'll try it again with a longer steeping time perhaps.

I think that next I'm going to try the Sacher tea. It's got a blend of Darjeeling and Ceylon as the base for the flavor and Darjeeling is my very favorite tea. Of course, tea is a highly context dependent thing and my mood may be for something completely different.

Tea at the Queen Mary Tea Room with matociquala and friend this past summer introduced me to Nilgiri tea which I really really liked. I've bought a couple since then and when ahead and ordered 4 ounces of the Korakundah Estate as I was pretty sure I'd like it. FOP, by the way, is flowery orange pekoe, which is a black tea leaf grade. It's an Indian tea.

The Keemun is a China tea and relatively recent developed as teas go. It's supposed to be fruity and flowery and slightly sweet. I ordered the sample but even if I like it am unlikely to order more. This particular Keemun is supposed to be one of the very best and retails for about $95 per pound! Unless I really really like it!

The Kenilworth is a Ceylon tea which I don't think I've tried before this just looked like a good one.

And really, who could resist a tea with Wild Monkey in the name, esp. when it's supposed to taste of marsala!

What kinds of tea do you like best? What are you drinking now?

ETA: Oh, I forgot about the rooibos. Obviously not a black tea either. I haven't tried rooibos before and I decided it was time I did.

John Philip Sousa was its most famous band leader, but certainly not the only one. The Marine Band was established way back in July of 1798. It's the oldest military band in the United States armed services.

It's often called The President's Own, a name that goes back to 1801, when John Adams asked the Band to provide a New Years Day concert at the brand new White House. The Band continues to perform at about 300 White House engagements every year.

The Marine Band has several distinctions that make it unique among the organizations of the US Marine Corps. While band members must complete the same recruit training that all other Marines undergo, once they have completed recruit training they are promoted to the rank of Staff Sergeant[1] and permanently assigned to the Band. They never serve in any other organization within the Marine Corps. They also wear a distinctive uniform with a red jacket in lieu of the dress blue jacket that is characteristic of all other US Marines. Band members wear special rank insignia with a lyre between the chevrons, instead of the crossed rifles all other Marines have.

For more about the US Marine Band, look here.


[1] It takes the rest of us six to ten years to make Staff Sergeant. Back before WW II it might take over 20 years.

I got some more of the giant mat last night and a bit more twice this morning, and then when I was sitting in the recliner with my cranberry juice, he dashed around like a crazy kitty. Every time he stopped, he licked at the bit still connecting the mat to his skin and pulled at it with his teeth. He probably did this at least ten times. I took the juice glass into the kitchen and when I came back, he was licking his back and the giant mat was in the recliner! He pulled a little close to the skin, so I wish he'd've let me finish, but his back hasn't twitched all the time I've been home. The giant mat is 4.5" long, 3.25" wide, and .75" deep. And that's about a third of the width already off.

I headed off to the library for bookgroup which grew from about six of us to 15 plus baby. We went to a place at the other end of the county called Dixie Bones which had really fabulous barbeque. I ordered a giant potato with butter, sour cream, cheese, and pork barbeque. This is the smallest meal they make and I couldn't finish it. I didn't bring it home because I was pretty close to done, but I did bring a slice of coconut pie after someone who lives close said how good it was. I'll have it later. It's not a big deal for us to eat closer to the library, since they're there anyway, but it's nice to eat at their end every now & then.

The cats wanted food as soon as I got home, of course, and I've scooped the litter boxes. Now to read LJ & ML, and the WashPost.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/is-public-option-un-un-dead.html

Having underestimated the resilience of the public option before, I'm naturally a bit reluctant to do so again. But with three or four Senators threatening to filibuster a bill that contains a public option, it's time for a review of the landscape.

The fundamentals of the public option are, in some sense, still fairly strong. It polls well. Perhaps more importantly, the CBO seems to think that it would save money. For this reason, I don't think we can completely rule out the possibility that Lincoln, Nelson, et. al. could be persuaded about its merits. Also, importantly, the bill that will be reported to the Senate floor will contain a public option, which leaves it with a certain amount of inertial momentum.

But I do think it's going to have to be a matter of persuasion -- and not strong-arm tactics. The two strong-arm tactics that people seem to be excited about are reconciliation -- a procedural maneuver to pass the bill through a majority-rules environment -- and a "progressive block" strategy in which progressives threaten to vote down the health care bill unless a reasonable public option is included. I don't think either of these are liable to have their desired effect.

What's wrong with the progressive block strategy? For one thing, it's not clear that the threat is credible. Technically speaking, the bill that the House passed did not contain what had initially been defined as a "robust" public option -- meaning one pegged to Medicare rates. But only one or two progressives wound up voting against it for this reason, even though many had threatened to do so.

But suppose that the threat were credible -- that Bernie Sanders and Roland Burris, say, were prepared to carry it out. And suppose that you're Blanche Lincoln. Don't you now have something close to the best -- or perhaps the least bad -- of both worlds? Now you can vote against a bill which is unpopular in your state and dodge some of the blame for doing so, insisting that it was those no good socialists lib'ruls who were responsible for torpedoing the bill's chances.

As for reconciliation, it has a whole host of problems. First of all, nobody is quite certain what provisions might be excised from the bill if reconciliation were the chosen path. The public option might not survive anyway. Or the public option might survive, but other provisions might be struck from the bill so as to make it untenable from either a political or a policy perspective.

Secondly, I expect that the reconciliation maneuver would play extremely poorly with the public. The health care bill is somewhat (although not overwhelmingly) unpopular to begin with. And believe it or not, the filibuster actually polls fairly well, at least in a theoretical sense. It might be one thing if the Republicans indeed exercised the filibuster to prevent a bill from coming to an up-or-down vote -- then you might score some rhetorical points. But it's another if you actively try to circumvent it via reconciliation or some sort of nuclear option. When you adopt a procedure that a majority opposes on process grounds in order to enact a bill that a plurality opposes on policy grounds, you're asking for a world of hurt.

Thirdly, it's not obvious that you'd be guaranteed 50 votes for passage under reconciliation. Any Democrats with misgivings about the bill itself or about the legitimacy of the reconciliation process (like Robert Byrd of West Virginia) could be expected to vote against the bill under reconciliation, which might leave it shy of a majority.

So what can advocates for the public option do? To be frank, I'm not sure that they can do all that much. This is mostly a matter of how Lincoln, Nelson and Lieberman wrestle with the politics of the issue. They hold almost all of the cards, and those that they don't hold are mostly held by the White House.

The reason I hold out some hope are because their objections to the public option are to varying degrees irrational. The health care bill isn't especially popular at the moment. But the public option is making its numbers better, and not worse.

And rightly or wrongly, progressive activists have adopted the public option to be the sine qua non of a "good" health care reform bill. I think that they're (mostly) wrong. The Senate's health care bill, even without a public option, would do a lot of good for a lot of people. And the public option, as currently constructed, would only enroll 3-4 million people, according to the CBO. It's a relatively minor provision, and one that, in its present, already-compromised state, I'd happily trade off for more comprehensive subsidies for the working poor, or a more robust Free Choice Amendment.

But I can't prevent other people from coming to their own conclusions. And rightly or wrongly, one of the greatest upsides to the Democrats in passing a health care bill is that it will help to activate the liberal base, in order to counteract the (already very active) conservative base in 2010. That upside will be diminished if the bill that Obama signs does not contain a public option.

One of the charms of the Solano Canyon neighborhood is its community garden. The retaining wall around it has a mosaic , and this is my favorite section. The spaceship is there because this is an Urban Farm and Orchard-U.F.O. The white domes under it are not a representation of a distant planet, but of something that existed here on earth for 13 years, the Justiceville Dome Village. Organized by activist Ted Hayes, it was a place where homeless people could live in geodesic domes designed by Craig Chamberlain to be economical and liveable. Justiceville was not just a place to live, but provided social and community services. In 1999, Justiceville got together with the Solano Canyon Community Garden Association to build this community garden. The lower and more level portion of the site was divided into plots for residents and school children, while the steep hilly part was terraced by workers from Justiceville.

( More pictures )

http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63650/Homemade-Hummus-and-Herbed-Pita-Chips-Recipe-from-Martha-Stewart

[recipe] homemade hummus and herbed pita chips from martha stewart and how OCD-breeding lifestyle puts me closer to the demigoddess

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63649/Spices-for-Javanese-Beef-Soup-Rawon

It's the spices that make rawon a unique beef soup from Java.

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63648/Potato-Leek-Ham-Soup

Creamy Potato, Leek, and Ham Soup--A great meal for a cold and blustery day

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63647/Old-Fashioned-Oat-Biscuits

Old-fashioned oat biscuits

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63646/Sous-Vide-Pork-Belly-Croquettes-with-Roasted-Corn-Cream

Sous-Vide Pork Belly Croquettes with Roasted Corn Cream. Party Food at its best!

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http://www.tastespotting.com/detail/63645/Lomo-Saltado-from-Lomo-Arigato-Truck

Only in Los Angeles: Japanese-Peruvian fare from a roach coach.

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