mayaland
Have I mentioned how much I am loving True Blood right now?
Well, I am. When season two first started, I have to admit, I didn’t know if I was going to stick with it because the first couple of eps were so…nasty. Horrific. Gross. Lafayette in the basement, Jason being wooed by the Fellowship of the Sun, and no romance with Sookie and Bill. I thought…this is too yucky. And there’s no one to root for. Why was it I liked this show again?
But I did stay with it and now, with only three eps to go, I’m really glad I did.
If you haven’t seen season two yet, when the DVD comes out, I highly recommend staying the course.
And if that is you….
!!!!!!!!!!!SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!
Really! Don’t read any more if you haven’t watched up to this point!
I mean it!
GO AWAY!
…………………
Okay. If you are still reading, it’s because you’ve already seen Season Two up to tonight’s episode. Agreed?
So. We’ve had this Fellowship of the Sun arc, Jason and Sookie on parallel paths, but with little cross over, each infiltrating the church in their own ways.
Here we have the freakiest Christian couple I’ve ever seen on tv. I mean, weird, hilarious, fucked-up, weird.
Below we have Sookie and Bill, probably arguing about how Sookie is going to sneak into the church and read everyone’s minds, as a favor to Eric. More on Eric in a minute.
By the way, why have Sookie and Bill had so little chemistry this season? I just barely care about them as a couple. Interesting. There is always that gorgeous string (violin? cello?) music theme when they kiss, standing in for real emotion that I should be feeling, but am not. Sorry Bill, but your arc with your maker is kind of boring. Although, early in the season, it was pretty funny when Sookie and BIll were fighting over the ‘parenting’ of new vampire Jessica.
Anyway, here is Jason doing his feel-good Christian Camp experience.
Holy GAWD that dude has a body.
Ahem.
So Sookie and Jason go about getting into the slimy underbelly of the Fellowship, and it’s kinda interesting, only I’m not sure, do I want to keep watching? And then, WHAM, we get Godric, a two thousand year old vampire who has offered himself to the church as a sacrifice, sparking a near war between vampires and humans. From his first moment, saving Sookie from rape, he immediately became the center of both stories, and one of the most interesting characters I have seen in a while.
I was HOOKED. Of course, he is GOD-ric, wink, wink. Well, he IS playing out a Christ-like role, right up to the sacrifice at the end. His death scene is AMAZING. Good work Anna Panquin on the acting!
Isn’t it interesting how Anna can look totally, gorgeously beautiful in one shot and then kind of dorky-plain in another?
Anyway, the church is nullified as hateful, greed-filled, and silly (“I hate your hair!”) and we find the real spiritual messages of bettering oneself, compassion, and forgiveness coming from a vampire. Cool. Sookie, Eric, and the others have now been exposed to Godric’s decisions, his calm, kind presence, and been changed by them, I think. I’m anticipating interesting things from these characters as a result.
There have been a lot of these reversals in the show, all the way back with the opening sequence in Episode One where the spooky, tattooed, black-haired dude is NOT the evil, threatening vampire, but the red-neck, good ole’ boy, IS a vampire, and he is just buying a six-pack and trying to mind his own business. I’d go so far as to say that reversals such as these are the POINT of the show, or at least one of the biggest tent-poles holding the whole thing up (accompanied by Exposing Prejudice of All Kinds, and occasional, but regular, raunchy sex scenes just to remind us that Hey, This Is HBO You’re Watching, and Don’t You Forget It.)
Meanwhile, back in Bon Temps, Tara has fallen under the sway of the Forces of Evil, in the form of Marianne.
Poor Tara has eaten of the shape-changer-heart casserole and participating in some rather disturbing, violent, sex orgies…
(okay, I looked for a picture of the sex orgies, but I couldn’t find one. Sorry.)
…and has gotten a a really hot boyfriend with the odd name of Eggs. Everything looks lovely between them, but he’s just a brainwashed minion of the devil. Another reversal. Poor Tara.
Interesting that Tara can be lost so far down this dark hole and not even realize it. The devil Marianne took out the voo-doo gal who did the exorcism on Tara last season (sheesh, I can’t remember her name!), by ripping her heart out (who got to eat that one, I wonder). Tara’s mother, changed now into a born-again-Christian figure, has repeatedly been shown as too weak to accomplish much, although her transformation from alcoholic-demon-mother to church-going-prayer-making-mother, seems to have stuck. It’s an improvement, but not by much, as her abandoning of Tara in jail is what opened Tara up to Marianne to begin with. Will Lafeyette and Tara’s mother be able to save Tara? We’ll find out tonight….
Or maybe Sookie, with her new exposure to GOD-ric, will come to her friend’s aid. And to the aid of all of Bon Temps. Because from the look of last week’s teaser, Bon Temps needs some serious saving from Marianne and her Evil Parties of Death.
Which brings me to the Transformation of Eric. Eric has gone from vaguely menacing, funny, and brutal (in the first season), to horrific monster (the basement freak-show scenes at the beginning of this season), to now, where he shows up as a more potent love interest for Sookie than Bill has ever been. Huh? How did that happen? His passionate devotion for his maker, Godric, has revealed depths to him that I never would have expected, depths that have moved me without my noticing it was happening, until here I am, rooting for him, this twisted (tearing the arms off the guy in the basement and being pissed about messing up his hair), lying (getting Sookie to suck the blood out of his chest by feigning near-death), brutally violent creature. Weird! And, Really Good Writing and Acting!
He’s cute, too. What do you think? Short hair or long? I was all for the long, but now I’m liking the short after that naked-pillow-talk scene, what with the muscles, and the broad shoulders, and the intimate smiles….
Uh…what was I saying?
Oh yeah! What in the world will happen with the very sweet love story between the perpetual Virgin Vampire Jessica, and the 28 year old just-barely-not a virgin Hoyt? They seem so profoundly DOOMED I can’t stop cringing every time they come on screen. I’m just waiting for the Bad Thing. I’m guessing Hoyt gets killed in the whole Marianne situation, and Jessica goes on a killing rampage. I hope not, for Hoyt’s sake. I like Hoyt. Didn’t you love how he stood up to his mother, and then took the potato-chip sandwich with him as he stomped out the door? Kind of detracted from the otherall statement he was trying to make, but increased his general adorableness, don’t you think?
And what about Sam? He’s done nothing but run away and sneak back this whole season. But he’s going to step up, I think. I hope. That turning into a fly business was pretty cool. He seems fated for more than bartender work, with such power at his disposal. Or maybe not…?
Anyway, I can’t wait for tonight’s episode! I’m a bit scared the show won’t succeed in carrying through all the themes and threads it has set into motion, but I’m feeling more and more trust in Alan Ball’s storytelling hands. He’s got me for the next three eps, that’s for damn sure. I wonder where he plans to take me?
I found these on the camera last night. I love the way Luc (3) sees things, so different from the way I think to frame photos, and so different from the subjects I choose. So today, guest photo blogger, Luc!
For more of Luc’s photos, you can go here. Enjoy….
They grow up so fast!
Here he was, just a few minutes old:
And here he is, just eight weeks later, a few minutes before he left us to live with his new family.
Running and jumping and humping everything that would stand still for it… Sob! Cinnamon, it all passed in a blur!
Joking aside, Sophie and I both cried. This is the hardest part of having dairy goats—in order to get milk, you have to have a lactating goat. And in order to have a lactating goat, you have to first have a pregnant goat. And pregnant goats mean goat babies, babies that, in all probability, we can’t keep. Every year, separating the babies from the mamas makes me doubt the rightness of having goats. Mostly I feel like our goats are happy and we’re happy to have them. But around this, the sending away of the unwanted (by the humans, not by the mamas!) kids, I always feel terrible.
Emma is the one who feels it the most here. Her closest buddy and pal is GONE. Look at how they slept each night:
I’ll bet you a hundred dollars they were in the womb like that. That first night he was gone, she kept pacing back and forth on the bed, confused, looking around and bleating….
Did slave owners 150 years ago have these feelings—feelings that must have been so much worse!!!—when they sold children away from their insane-with-grief-parents? I mean, I’m keeping a person (a goat person) in captivity so that I can benefit from a product they create, just like the old slave owners did. Does that seem like too extreme a comparison? Goats are just animals, after all. I don’t know. I’m conflicted!
What I do to deal with it is put a lot of energy into finding people to take our babies who seem kind and loving and desirous of having happy goat friends. I mean, look at these nice people who took him home:
They have another little boy goat named Knuckles who needs a pal. Cin and Knuckles! I predict they will be life long friends.
But still, hearing the mamas cry for their babies, fielding the callbacks from new owners who are worried because their new goat bleats non-stop in distress for three days, well, this part is pretty awful. I don’t want to harden my heart to it, because who wants a hard heart? But I hate it.
On the other hand, I know they do all right. They connect to their new herd and their new humans and they settle down into new happy lives. It’ll be okay. I keep telling myself, and Sophie, that it will be okay. It will. Really.
Here is Cinnamon getting his last suckle:
….and his last hug from Sophie.
We’ll miss him! Well, not the constant humping. (What is it about men, anyway?)
Good luck, buddy!
Because you never know when she’s going to jump out, claws extended, and wipe the floor with you. I’m walking along the path at night, bleary and minding my own business, when WOMP! Tiny razor sharp claws and teeth scrabble across my ankles—and then she’s away into the dark, invisible and triumphant, and I am left swearing and bleeding. Kato 1, Maya 0.
And then I find her sleeping in my clean clothes basket, again, head draped over the edge in total relaxation. Why does she get to be the Bad Ass Queen of the Universe? She only ways like eight ounces or something! Where did this innate certainty in her total superiority come from? I want some of that!
Maybe if I juice her little furry butt and drink her up in a cocktail, I, too, can be All Powerful. Probably not, but, you know. Maybe.
Just kidding! Sheesh.
Walking on our property yesterday, everything is lost in green, but somehow, you can feel that the peak of summer has passed.
The small creek is almost dry—just enough mud that the kids like to muck about in it. It will start filling up with fall rains, soon.
We didn’t do a goat walk this time—I’m not convinced that the babies wouldn’t run away. We’ll wait a bit longer before taking them all out.
Look at how tiny Luc looks next to this huge poplar!
The first red leaves of fall are starting to appear. These are sassafras, so pretty.
The times, they are a changing….
We have completely, and thoroughly, moved in, FINALLY, to the Noah House!
[cue cheering!]
That is to say, we haven’t moved out of the yurt, we’re just…spreading. And in case you don’t know what I am talking about, here is the beginning of the story of recycling a tiny house, the tiny house my cousin Noah built, and, more recently, here is a picture of how it looks from the outside.
But today I offer you pictures from the inside! With all our STUFF! I know you’ve been just aching to see these, come on, admit it.
Okay, without further ado, let’s walk in through the front door. What do we see but….
A sofa! And some kids! On the floor, coloring! And some book shelves! Ooo, ahhh.
For contrast, let’s look at the view the day after the carpentry crew left:
And here it is when Paul was about half-way done:
But now, it’s a real room. With toys and books and computers and all my yoga props…I’m so happy to have a place for my yoga props, I can’t tell you.
This is the view when I am sitting on that green futon sofa (craigslist, we love you). Look, you can see the yurt through the windows! And if you look a bit to the left, you see this:
Lots of pine bead board and recycled cherry wood trim….
…and a little farther to the left, you see this:
(UPDATE: for what happened with the little room to the side, visit here.) It’s an extremely pleasant space. It’s odd that it can be so small, 12′ x 12′, and still feel quite spacious, but it does, probably because of the height of the ceilings.
Because here is what I see if I look up:
It’s fourteen feet high at the top, because Noah wanted to be able to stand up in the loft. In a tiny house, design follows the physical body of the person doing the building.
But Noah, being the thrill seeker he is, used to sleep up there with no rails. Not so great for small kids. So, look at those lovely rails that Paul built so that Sophie could have a loft, and I could NOT have a heart attack every time she went up there. Aren’t they pretty? The wood for the posts was left over from something else, stored for years now under the yurt. Paul says he cleared out a ton of old wood he had been storing, making all the trim. So whoopee for having less junk around, I say, not to mention the attractive price-point.
But really, I didn’t realize trim was such a big deal. (Don’t tell Paul I said that, because he used to be a trim carpenter.) Never the less, I can now say with confidence, trim is not just some wood slapped up in the corners! Trim makes the room. Trim is the trimmings, the details. And attention to the details is what transforms a space from a box to a lovely room you want to hang out in. I swear.
For example, here is the first step in the front door:
It’s a piece of cast off granite, rescued from a dumpster, and framed by Paul in oak. The floor here is recycled walnut. Plus a kitten always helps.
It’s gorgeous. Every time I step in, even if I don’t consciously think about it, I take in that beauty. The more details like that, the more a space feels right.
Build a small square room and it could be a hovel, a dark cave, a boring box. Give it lots of exposed wood, windows on all sides with lots of them in the south, and tons of love in the details, and suddenly you have something else entirely. I really do think the lack of love in the details is the reason speed-built, mass-produced houses so frequently lack soul. When you build things yourself, and when you do it on a tiny scale, the details are all within your power and creativity. And that’s a good thing.
Quick, before we leave, let’s take a peek up in the loft.
Sophie lined up a bunch of teddy bears to live under the windows. Sitting here, reading while it rains outside, is about the most peaceful thing ever.
One last view from the corner. Hey, where did the kids go?
Oh, here they are.
Keep it small, build it yourself, pay little or nothing for recycled materials, and make the details yours. You, too, can have a tiny, beautiful, personal, space.
Thank you, again, Noah.
Making yogurt is totally easy. But goat milk yogurt can be a bit tricky—it wants to come out runny, which is fine for smoothies, but not for that custardy sweet treat the kids love. I have tried making goat yogurt with different cultures (some unbelievably tart, some too gooey, some too runny), and I have heard of, though haven’t tried yet, adding various things such as gelatin, pectin, non-fat dried milk powder, and rennet for firming it up. But lately, I’ve hit on a method that produces a smooth, thick yogurt, mild enough to need just a bit of honey and even my picky kids will eat it up.
Here’s what I use:
- A quart of goat milk.
- A digital thermometer.
- A Yogotherm, which is basically a yogurt-container-shaped polystyrene cooler for incubating the yogurt sans electricity. You could use a regular cooler plus a heating pad or bottles of hot water to add heat. The downside of that is you have to keep checking to make sure things aren’t too hot or too cold, and I’m way too lazy for that. The Yogotherm just makes things really easy, and I use it for making chevre, too.
- And finally, see that little bottle on the left? That is my secret ingredient, a direct set yogurt culture, in this case, ABY-2C from the Dairy Connection (thank you, once again, Molly at www.fiascofarm.com for turning me on to this). I have found this culture to produce a thick, custardy yogurt without having to add anything else. Yes, of course, you can put in a few tablespoons of active live culture yogurt from the grocery store instead of a direct-set culture, but I’ll tell you, I just haven’t had good results with grocery store yogurt in my goat milk. I get runny, sour yogurt that way. Shrug.
You also need one of these:
My trusty kettle! In service for twenty years and counting!
And you’ll need one each of these:
That is, a stainless steel pot for heating the milk, and a stainless steel spoon of some kind. I use my cheesemaking slotted spoon thingy.
Okay. Let’s get started!
First you pour your quart of milk into the pot and heat it up to 180 degrees. This kills anything in the milk that you don’t want to culture, leaving all that sweet, delicious, bacteria medium that is warm milk for the good bacteria you’ll be putting in. It also changes that structure of the milk proteins, making a smoother yogurt. You can also make yogurt with raw milk if you are really, really confident that your milking practices are CLEAN. I would never make raw milk yogurt from goats that were not mine, just because I would be able to be sure, you know? And eating bacteria food is weird enough without wondering. You don’t want to be wondering with your yogurt.
Stir your milk frequently, so as not to scorch it (yuck), and measure the temperature often.
180! Bingo!
Now you wait for the milk to cool back down to 115-117 degrees, the temperature that the yogurt culture thrives in.I use this time to boil water in the kettle (you were wondering what the kettle was for, weren’t you?) and pouring it into the yogotherm and on the inside of the lid to get it all sterlized and prewarmed.
Okay, 115 degrees. We’re there….
Next, sprinkle in 1/32 teaspoon of the direct set culture into the milk and stir it around. Yes, they make measuring spoons that small. I have some stainless steel sppons I picked up for 2 bucks. You can eyeball it, of course, but I like to be precise with as many variables as I can, so I can figure out what went wrong when something does. Especially when dealing with bacteria. For example, you find that your yogurt is too gloopy, try using less culture, something easier to do when you know exactly how much you used. A teeny tiny dab is really all it takes for a quart of milk.
Did you know that ‘smidgen’ is the official name of 1/32 of a teaspoon? Really! Look, it says so right on my spoon.
Moving right along, you pour the inoculated milk into the yogotherm and close it up.
Six or seven hours goes by so quickly! All the while the bacteria eat the sugars in the warm milk and turn them into acids. Weird, huh? Try to time it so your six or seven hours doesn’t end in the middle of the night. Or, be like me and forget, only to wake up with a start in the small hours of the morning to go put your yogurt in the fridge.
But look, POOF, open it up six hours later and you’ve got thick, delicious yogurt!
Try not to think about that whole bacteria thing, and instead, drizzle some honey on your yogurt and eat it up…
If it’s still not thick enough for you, you can drain some of the whey out using a coffee filter set up, which is how they make greek yogurt, like that Fage stuff. I love that stuff. Making my own is a heck of a lot cheaper, what are those little Fage containers, like two bucks or something? Yikes. And hey, if you drain the yogurt a bit more you get yogurt cheese, which you can use for all kinds of things.
We eat tons of yogurt around here. Sometimes I think Luc is about 47% composed of yogurt. It doesn’t seem to be doing him any harm.
Enjoy!
The other day we were doing our hanging out thang when SUDDENLY the water in our water glasses started doing this mysterious shimmy that could only mean One Thing.
HOLY CRAP! Dinosaurs stalking us through the forest!
But no worries, after all their recent training in zombie killing, Sophie and Luc were totally up to the task.
Can we say Kids Gone Mental?
But after wrestling this Parasaurolophus to the ground, my dynamic duo realized that there were simply too many of them. The forest was teeming with dinosaurs! What to do, what to do????
I know! Hit the PAUSE button!
Poof! Giant, amazing dinosaurs frozen for all to see! Perfect!
Look at this one, peeking out from behind a tree:
The kids were just screaming with excitement when they saw it. This guy (gal? I’m not checking, that’s for damn sure) is as long as THREE YURTS.
That’s a lot of dinosaur!
Honestly, seeing life sized dinosaurs frozen among the trees makes me really, really glad they are EXTINCT.
Here I was trying to get Sophie to stand in the shot in such a way that it would look like the was going to stomp on the head of the dino, but she really wasn’t interested. She wanted to run, run, run to see what was next….
Ironically, the small ones were more scary. Maybe because they don’t simply boggle the mind? I can pretty easily imagine one of these little blue guys ripping me into shreds….um, yikes.
This one is called a Maya-saurus. I’m not even kidding! Okay, it’s really spelled Maiasaurus, but that’s close. And get this: it’s the so-called ‘Mother Dino’ because it’s bones are usually found next to nests of its own kind. That’s right. Somebody named a dinosaur after me. The Mommysaurus.
Rawr!
Anyway, after staring at dinosaurs all morning, we searched for, and found, the rift in the space-time continuum that had allowed this leakage of prehistoric critters into our own time-stream, and, well, we sent them all home. Good-bye dinos, it’s been fun. And it’s a good thing Luc remembered to press PLAY, or they might have been PAUSED forever. Because dinosaurs love to PLAY.
After that, we had lunch. PBJ anyone?
The time has come to reveal that lately, here at the yurt, we have a secret identity, a secret purpose, one we take very, very seriously.
We kill zombies.
I know I previously commented on a lack of zombie action here in yurtsville, but all that has changed in the last few weeks. Here is why.
[Dun dun DA!]
That’s right. Plants vs. Zombies! Betcha didn’t know you could protect your lawn from zombies with horticulture. Well, we’re here to tell you: YOU CAN. And it is crazy fun! Because, when I say that Plants vs. Zombie’s has eaten our brains, I mean that in best possible way. Here look.
See the pea shooters to the left? And the zombies approaching from the right? We’ve got a bunch of cone-heads, a few bucket-heads, a scuba zombie, a javelin zombie, that guy in the ice machine is a zomboni. Up top you can see the flag zombie, leading the charge—see his little flag with the brain on it?
Aren’t they adorable?
How can zombies, animated, rotting corpses that want to eat your brains, how can they be adorable? That’s just weird.
But it’s only part of mystery that makes this relatively simple game—the goal is to plant a good defensive line of sunflowers, shooters, chompers, squash, etc. (eventually you collect twenty or thirty different kinds of plants) to stave off wave after wave of zombies—so freaking SATISFYINGLY FUN. Is it watching the zombies fall apart as the trundle across the lawn? Is it watching them turn to blackened ash when you explode them with a good cherry bomb? Is it the ever expanding roster of funny zombies and plants? Because the game is nothing if it isn’t amusing. Amusing CRACK.
Here is a nighttime scene where you have to use various kinds of mushrooms (no sunlight in the night) to defend the lawn. Looking at this screen, my mouse hand itches to plant! It’s silly, challenging, and makes you forego sleep to keep playing. I’m telling you, Popcap hit the formula for playability just exactly right when they made this game. The kids play, Paul plays, I play, we cheer each other on, shout strategy from the sidelines, groan when the zombies break through our line and eat our brains—its just hours and hours of zombie killing fun! And it impresses the heck out of me that the game’s creators have managed to make something that is equally compelling to the three and five year old kids in the house, as well as their late thirty year old parents. That’s not easy to do! And they knocked it out of the park!
You should have heard us screaming in exultation the other night when the kids and I (I was driving the mouse for this one) beat the Zombot! We were all up dancing with the zombies, let me tell you, singing along with the break away pop hit “There’s a Zombie on your Lawn.”
Good times! Highly recommended game. And just think how prepared we’ll be when the zombies come for us! I can just see us out there, arranging all the junk into zombie killing traps. Because everyone needs a Zombie Contingency Plan.
You know I’m right.
- MAYA LASSITER is a writer of fantasy novels, an unschooling mom, a yogini, a goat keeper, a yurt dweller, and an all-around cool person. Except when she's a boring ninny. Hopefully she won't post on those days.
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today's yoga practice
- sunday
February 6, 2012 | 10:06 amFull Primary with Sharath’s CD.
- friday
February 3, 2012 | 7:17 pmIntermediate to Tittibasana, Swensized versions of most of it. Felt wonderful. I think I might start doing this more often.
- thursday
February 3, 2012 | 7:15 pmFull Primary.
- wednesday
February 1, 2012 | 11:58 amFull Primary.
- tuesday
February 1, 2012 | 11:57 amSKIP!
SHAME. -
Archive for today's yoga practice »
- sunday
twitterage
"stefan grossman is the real deal, if you ask me: I’m still playing my little parlor guitar most evenings, someti... http://t.co/f897eh7Y"yesterday"another overheard conversation: Luc is sitting on a skateboard, rolling through the yurt, la la la, thinking abo... http://t.co/HsEh0jqg"3 days ago"a conversation overheard: Luc is fascinated by war games. Playing “army men” with a thousand little people, anim... http://t.co/iTMt9FlN"3 days ago"the SS Novel 2012 is underway: This past Sunday I officially started a new novel. [Fireworks!] It had been so lo... http://t.co/8JD1fF3O"6 days ago"like i needed a second daily yoga practice: Because my days are just adrift with wide open spaces of nothing to ... http://t.co/VmqJCuXp"8 days ago
"Dusi's Wings" April, 2003. . . .
"One thing fantasy can do for us is to give shape to the mysterious in the world; another is to make emotional yearning concrete. The early sections of "Dusi's Wings" do just that...there was a strong grasping towards the spiritual in fantasy here that was very promising, and I look forward to reading more by Lassiter." --review, Tangent Online.
