So now, PHOTOS:

Kind of a yellow picture but it makes my kitchen feel all 70’s.

I’m a hippie.

Ingredients!

Progress!

Miso looks on.

Mixing frosting in an enchanted forest.

Oscar prepares for his role as Official Brownie Tester.

Miso looks on disapprovingly.

LOOK GUYS, BROWNIES.

In other news, I heard Jumper by Third Eye Blind on the radio a few days ago and decided I should own that album again. I got the CD in something like 1997, but somewhere along the way I lost the case and then stopped listening to it entirely because I developed a bad association with it (this happens to me an unfortunate amount). Anyway, I was about to break down and spend the $8.99 to download it when I thought to check around my room just in case it had survived the 10 moves (I seriously just counted) that have taken place since I bought the damn CD, and… I FOUND IT! This was pretty miraculous. It felt like the universe said, “You’re having a shitty time. Here’s a CD you thought you lost under your bed 10 years ago!” It’s still a pretty good album; it’s aged surprisingly well. (Edit: except for the use of the term “cyberspace.” That does rather date this.) And I’m 25 now instead of 13, so it makes a lot more sense. I had this same epiphany about Jagged Little Pill a while back – turns out music written by 20-somethings is far more relevant when you’re 20-something. I was the wrong age in the mid to late 90’s to appreciate most of the music I was listening to at the time.

So beer? I think so. Right now we have some Southern Tier IPA, which is fantastic. If you like super-hoppy IPAs, please try this. It’s delicious. On a related note, I might be brewing beer in the near future (with help from Stacey). If it happens, I will blog about it!

A couple of weeks ago, Stacey and I were really bored one night and  decided to check who was playing at Great Scott in Allston – turned out it was Eluvium, an ambient band I had heard of before. We ended up going, and it was a really great show. I need to go to more ambient shows in the future. I wasn’t sure what to expect, really, as ambient music is by nature pretty quiet, but it’s also really beautiful turned up super loud on nice speakers, I found out. I also wasn’t sure how much of the show would be live instruments, but there was a lot of live piano and guitar mixed with samples/loops from a computer. And a Wii remote being used to trigger some samples. That was pretty nifty.

After the show we lurked at the merch table and ended up with some vinyl of both Eluvium and the opening act, Julianna Barwick. I also picked up the newest Eluvium release, Similes, at Newbie’s the other day. Both albums I ended up with are really nice, although I’m partial to Similes, which includes a lot of quiet vocals that decidedly add to everything else going on. The album I got on vinyl, Miniatures, seems to be somewhat less cohesive.  On both releases there’s tons of lovely piano, in particular on the song The Motion Makes Me Last, off Similes. I could listen that over and over, and have been…

I’m having a hard time describing this – it’s perfect music to think by. Unobtrusive, but beautiful and affecting. Like most really good ambient, it’s effective either as background or for intent listening, quiet or loud, speakers or headphones.

I also mentioned kitty photos:

There are more of these, but I’ll save them for another post.

(I’ve been at home a lot lately, so Miso and I have been hanging out. He’s just so photogenic, I can’t help myself…)

Also, on the song “Running Blind,” which was in English to begin with, I couldn’t for the life of me under the word “echoes” until I looked up the lyrics online because the “k” sound is completely missing. I guess the pronunciation is weird coming from Russian or something. But now there’s this remix of said song, and they totally punched in the missing syllable! I find this unspeakably entertaining.

My computer doesn’t seem to appreciate so much running Firefox and Songbird (my pretty Linux-compatible music player) and transferring about a hundred photos at once. But some of those photos (the ones that aren’t from April of LAST YEAR) are of hopefully delicious bread! So prepare yourself, dear reader, for a barrage of really bad photos:

And here’s Stacey doing dishes! He gets husband points.

And finally, one of the cat. Because he was laying in our clean laundry.

AWWW so cute. But so much fur in our laundry…

If you’ve known me for a while, you know I suck at cooking. Maybe not as bad as some people (ask Oscar about the grilled cheese incident sometime), but you still shouldn’t leave me at home by myself for more than a few hours… I end up eating slices of cheese and stale cookies, anything to avoid making actual dinner. It’s not really terrible, I just tend to turn the heat up too high, or not add enough water, or not pay enough attention to what I’m doing because I’m easily distracted, and things burn and stick to pans and end up tasting none too great. Microwaves are my friend generally… I lived out of the frozen dinner section at Trader Joe’s when Stace used to work closing shifts at B&N.

But baking! It’s all the fun of cooking with none of the frustration. None of this endless chopping of vegetables, or standing around stirring for 10 minutes, or making sure the heat is low enough not to set the pan on fire (which I have managed before) but still high enough to cook things sometime in the next year. Baking is scientific. Measure each ingredient, mix until it’s the right consistency, set a timer, put it in the oven and walk away. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea. Make tasty things and surf the internet (is it 1996?) at the same time? Sign me up.

So that is that. In addition to writing about my baking misadventures, I will also babble about my various knitting and painting projects. And dying my hair crazy colors. And… obsessively taking photos of my cat.