So last night, I was somewhat stupid, and stayed up way later than I needed to. Granted, I like to do this when I want to conk out right away, but it was after 2 by the time I got off the computer and went upstairs.

I woke up around 9:30 to go to the bathroom, and debated staying awake. Decided to sleep "just a little longer".

It was 12:30 when I woke up. I haven't done that in quite awhile. I was kind of annoyed with myself, since I had all sorts of things in mind to possibly do today.

And then I remembered the dreams I had.

I spent the next hour writing down two of them, one of which had THE most amazing, hauntingly beautiful setting I think I've ever thought of, conscious or unconscious. The dream actually had something like a plot, but it was the plot of a video game, so it will probably be scrapped. The setting, however... The best part is, I can see it clear as day in my head, and I've been thinking about it pretty constantly since I woke up, to help the image stay. Plus I sketched it out like three different ways, and wrote out as much detail as I could possibly think of.

I've been trying to decide if I could put this place into one of my in-progress stories, or if it needs something new. It's definitely something a Phisto could have made, and it might even be something Kris finds attached to her villa in the woods...


An underground room, quite like a cave but definitely man-made, the walls all of heavy, rough-hewn stone. Dark and dank, lichen on the walls, the stone damp. The room, glimpsed first through some gaps in a wall of an approaching walkway, is maybe 30' across, nearly square. A walkway runs along each of the four walls, and a bridge crosses it about a third of the way to one side.


As seen from the bridge:
Down below, there are three pools, each one set farther down than the previous. Thick, low stone walls border each pool. The nearest pool, between five and ten feet below and tucked into the far right corner, has a gentle spring rippling up into the dark water. There are a few plants to be seen in the slowly moving water, vague impressions of green. In the near left corner of this pool, there is a statue.

It is in the shape of a young woman, laying flat down in the water, her face turned to one side, a placid (blank?) expression on her face. Her back is to us, her arms outstretched across the water, which laps gently up around her sides. Her hair is long and wavy, extending out into the water, just as hair would in the motion of that particular pool... as if a girl had turned to stone, lying in that position, or - and this was more the sense of the room - a girl had died in such a position, and the statue was made in obsessive, pained memory of her.

The statue stops at the waist, where there is a low stone wall over which the water silently spills into the next pool, which wraps around the rectangle of the first, maybe a foot or two lower down. This one is filled with plants, the strangely vivid green of plants growing in a dim, moist forest valley. It is somehow clear that these were purposely planted here... their common name is "mermaid's tail", since the shape of the leaves so closely resembles one. The leaves are very large and long, and curl and unfurl languidly in the slight currents.

One of the leaves lines up eerily well with the cut-off waist of the statue, giving the impression of a mermaid, half-bound in stone.

Scattered around this second pool are smaller statues, at a bit of a distance from the main one, so as not to distract from it. They are also mermaids of stone, echoing the first image.

The third pool is a good deal farther down, maybe fifteen feet - though the water makes scarcely a sound as it slides down into it. It is dark, with a few vague plant shapes, but there is little motion, and it lies there somewhat ominous in the shadows clinging to the stone walls.


...somehow or another, the group of girls that were walking around the room triggered the curse on the room, and were attacked by snakes and some sort of tentacled plant or serpent in the water. Along one of the edges of a walkway stood three music stands, the fold-up kind most people have at home, all rusted and half-disassembled. One was clearly a hundred years or so old, one maybe fifty, one only ten or twenty. Putting these together would somehow open an exit from the room, so no-one else would get eaten by the monster. Once out, the long hallways and vast rooms off to the sides became more like an museum or school. I saw inside one room, and it was a giant's playroom, with toys as tall as a person scattered all through, a ceiling you could barely see. There was no dust or decay, but the colors were all faded and faint, and the sense of time was immense. The main feature of the room was a giant rocking horse - in the dream, I recognized it as the Trojan Horse from Unico, and stopped to stare, all sorts of chills running through me. (It's a very creepy character, full of wisdom but so, so unbelievably old.) It looked quite different, hand-painted in a modern version of Egyptian tomb scenes, with a faded handmade blanket on its back, but it was somehow still the Trojan Horse.

It was about this point we were discovered by some sort of authority, and we got kicked out, and I think I woke up.


While the giant's nursery had a great atmosphere, it's pretty derivative - pretty sure my subconscious pieced that one together from Unico, the bit in "The Silver Chair" where Eustace and Jill stay at the giants' palace, and, come to think of it, "The Velveteen Rabbit". But that stone room with the pools...I have no idea where that came from, and I could spend days in there, I can see it so clearly, and it had such a strong feeling haunting the room...

 
Tom is officially in California. And as much as I hate going to sleep in an empty house (guess who's going to be sleeping with headphones still in, so she doesn't hear all the weird noises the house makes??), there are a few up-sides.

I can play music. As much as I want. And whatever music I want - all the jpop and girly country music I can eat.

COOKING. I love cooking for just me. While at work I accidentally started looking forward to the Subway pizza sub (with ranch and jalapenos) Tom usually brings me, my stomach is going to be MUCH happier about the little stir-fry I made myself. This is how complex a Melissa-meal is:

A splash of veggie oil in the littlest frying pan I own. Shook out some frozen veggie mix into pan. Threw some zahtar blend over it. Dug out some previously-cooked rice (a mix of regular and purple rice), threw that in. Nice big heap of pre-sliced ginger. (I LOVE GINGER.) Splash of soy sauce.

Eating it out of the pan it was cooked in.

I cannot even tell you how delicious this tastes. I love little meals like this. Don't get me wrong, I love my big cheesy casseroles too, but, this makes me just feel so much lighter and better through and through. There is no way Tom is weaseling his way out of taking me farmer's market/fruit stand shopping when the season happens. Noooo way.

I should invent a good default sauce for him, that I can whip up a bit of to drown his portion in when I make little things like this. I'm currently on a veggie binge.

...I am also tooootally going to make a second batch of that garam masala tofu scramble I linked two posts ago. If I'm ambitious, maybe I'll ride over to Tops and try to find some actual fennel tomorrow.


But for now, I am pooped. It was *crazy* busy in the store tonight. Balloon orders have seriously picked up now that the weather's nicer, and we're going through stacks of cards and bunches of gifts (nearly all of which need wrapped) for Mother's Day. But! We still have left-over $1 Webkinz from last weekend - we're trying like crazy to get them out of the store, since they have to be registered on the website by the end of the month. And Ann let me pick out one for free, since I "did so much" for the whole shindig. Yaaaaaaay I have awesome bosses. :)

I haven't been on the Webkinz site in mooonths. I'm going to go adopt my new black poodle now, and see what kind of extra goodies I get. \0/

 
I am posting a copy of the recipe binder cover I made myself. It is so adorably kitchy, I am in love.

(darn you, blogger, why are you inverting my colors when I upload??? ...ohwait, probably because the image is 9"x11" - and at like 200dpi. hmm. let's scale it down and try again. theeeeere we go.)


I took it to work to print up a copy (yes I paid for it ;p), because work has much better printers than I do, and could also print it larger than 8 1/2 x 11. The swirly bits, I drew myself, everything else is stock patterns and brushes. (Though I did "arrange" the flowers in the corner, hee.) I wanted a sort of scrapbooky look to it, but - as always - a little bit old, too. I went all sorts of directions, but decided to keep it a bit pared down in the end.

I also wanted it lemon yellow and swedish blue, since those are the colors my kitchen is going to be someday. 0:)

 
Since I needed to slice some tofu for miso soup anyway, I whipped up the garam masala tofu scramble recipe I bookmarked a few days ago. It is AWESOME. It's such a unique combination of flavors, it's delicious. (Unless you're not a fan of licorice-y flavors in your food.) Couldn't find any fresh fennel at the grocery store, so I threw in maybe half a teaspoon or so of fennel seeds, which worked quite nicely. Even Tom said it's a great mix of flavors - just, not any flavors that he likes. Which I'd figured, I'd planned on this being a Melissa-lunch food.

I do wish I could find a better selection of tofu around here - even the "extra firm" variety of the one brand I can get in Fredonia gets pretty smushy pretty quickly. It does alright in this recipe, but it doesn't hold up in my soup as well as I'd like.

...good god, whoever thought I'd eat tofu enough to start getting picky about it. O_o;;;


In other recipe exploits - Tom is flipping out over the chocolate toffee cookies I baked. And my nutmeg-y sugar cookies are AMAZINGLY soft and cakey, and made for a phenomenal mini-sundae when paired with vanilla ice cream, left-over butterscotch chips, and a generous splash of butter shots. <33

I also went through and organized my giant pile of printed-out recipes today. I've been jotting notes on most as I try them out, rating them and making note of things I really like or Tom doesn't like, changes I should make, whatever else. I put them together into categories, and found a spare three-ring binder.

Then I showed Tom - who had been harassing me about not making him breakfast - the binder with papers stacked half an inch thick. "THIS, is how many different recipes I have made you. All noted and rated, whether you liked it or not," etc etc.
Tom: "...you're really in this for the long-haul, aren't you?"

But he was suitably impressed and a little awed at the amount of recipes, and went on to say that he really doesn't appreciate me half as much as he should, and I got several very nice hugs before he went to work. I win.


I am also having a field day with patterned-paper stock images, making a cover for my recipe book. Though I've considered digital scrapbooking before, I hadn't really tried playing around in that style much. It's quite entertaining - I just have like six different designs in my head for the cover, and I need to decide which ones I'm weeding out. ^^;;


eeeee I am so happy with this new layout. Tom even likes it! (Except he feels that the background should either scroll with the text, or the text should disappear once it reaches the top of the text-box area. I agree, but, an endlessly-long image is impractical for me, and I still don't know how to make the text disappear. Artistic vision once again takes a back seat to a lack of coding aptitude. :p)

 
Hey! guesswhat.

NEW LAYOUT!!!

well kind of. New picture, anyway, and some minor tweaks to suit. Matt, your comments cut me to the heart, I had to change things. brat. ;p I'm sure you'll still hate it, but I like it better, and that's what matters.

This may well be ridiculous on other peoples' monitors - heaven forbid you have an 800x600 resolution, you're so doomed to scroll sideways. But it looks lovely on my computer. I'll have to see how it is on Tom's later. Unfortunately, this background does not (currently) lend itself well to your screenview being bigger than mine. (Fortunately, only nerds like Tom will have ones bigger than me, and nerds like him don't care enough about people to do things like read blogs. SO I WIN.)

I really wanted to use that shot of an orchid in a layout. This is not entirely what I had in mind when I went into Photoshop, but, when is it ever? All my own photos are layered in there. The oooonly only thing not mine is the pattern I used to overlay on the text area to get lil bits of color. well and the brushes, I used a few star things I picked up around the 'nets.

I also buckled down and made my own little last.fm chart, wooo. (This basically consisted of me copying a chunk out of the full version of the image I made for this background. And then drawing lil swirls on it.)


I also played a little more with the "stone child" background I made the other day, trying to make it into a layout. It's closer. I drew in some viney things and a flower, because I like drawing them, and then I colored them, because I'm currently in love with light aqua and colors that go with it. We'll see if I still like it in the morning. (My tentative plan for that one is an art blog, to post pictures and things of whatever project I just finished. And I can keep things find-able via tags. And it'll be nice and quick to update all the time. A less stressful site/portfolio.)


I baked some chocolate-toffee cookies today, and made the dough for some nice simple nutmeg-heavy vanilla sugar cookies, which has probably chilled long enough by now for me to bake them. My two latest casseroles, Tom will eat, but only if he is desperate. (One's a stewed beef + veggies in a tomato-ish base, with biscuits on top, that wound up a bit dry and mediocre in his book. I enjoy it. The other is an asparagus bread pudding recipe I found on 101cookbooks, that I knew he wouldn't be too keen on, but I find nice and filling.) I have a chicken casserole planned, but I think I'm going to hold off on it until next week, as I have spent enough money this week already. ^^;;

...I'm currently keeping close tabs on every dollar I spend, to see why Tom has waaay more money than me. I'm definitely spending more on groceries than he is on bills, I can tell you that already - that was our initial deal, he'd do bills, I'd do food, and we figured it would break about even. I think that's changed a bit, probably because we're no longer eating solely rice and ramen. (We also raaaarely went out to eat when we started out here. Also didn't drink any alcohol.) I've kept my spending largely reigned in the past few weeks, but... things like wedding gifts and birthday gifts and things keep happening. hmm.


I actually went out the other night! One of my coworkers was plotting a party at her place, since her parents were gone for the weekend - shush, they actually tacitly gave her permission to have a party, as long as there was no mess. ;) She's a pretty fun person to hang out with, and she was all worried no-one was going to come, so I thought hey, what the hell, I'll go for awhile. I tried to talk Tom into it, and I could tell he was tempted, but, he opted out. Uh, it wound up only being me and her and another girl from work (who I also like hanging out with)...but it was actually really nice, and pretty darn fun. We were pretty tipsy by the time I went home around one - apparently half an hour later, two other girls from work dropped in, but, I had to be at work at 9am, so I was good and went home to sleep. 0:)


This weekend was Webkinz Extravaganza weekend...though funnily enough, I was only scheduled to work Saturday. I did my best to get things all organized for everyone else though, printed up paperwork and little slips of paper with prizes on them to put inside balloons for kids to pop, etc. When I got in Saturday morning, I ran around and checked to see what we were out of, updated the lists, filled in the shelves...
And was promptly bored enough to go work on some print jobs out back for a few hours. It wasn't half so crazy as it was last year. We got pretty swamped right at lunch time, and again around dinnertime, but only for maybe half an hour were things non-stop. We had a million people working, so we could spare a few people to dress up in big fuzzy animal costumes and dance around by the road - and I got to face paint. ^______^ I felt bad, there really weren't enough kids to even justify one of us doing it, and Kate had wanted to as well. But we filled in some of the time painting stars and things on other employees (Amanda, who is short and blond and rather doll-like, wanted an "I LOVE MOM" with a big heart on her arm - I made sure to loop barbed wire around the heart for her), and I did get a handful of kids down there to color and get face painted. I filled in the shelves again at the end of the afternoon, and my guess is around 50 Webkinz sold, in that one day. Not as much as last year, but still not bad. When I go in Tuesday, I should be able to cross a few more off the list, and hoooopefully have maybe one less mountain of boxes out back? ^^;;


BUT, I need to stop thinking about work. It's been stressing me out so much lately, and I need to enjoy my days off and stoooop freaking thinking about it. Crochet! Crocheting is good. I ordered some yarn today to start on a quick-to-make throw for a wedding gift (though I need to double-check my colors once they get here, I bought a few options in case the monitor mislead me - I'll rush-order the rest like the next day). On a whim, I'd bought myself a single little skein of 50% linen/50% cotton yarn when I ordered a sample card for the yarn for my skirt, just to test and see what linen felt like. It's surprisingly stiff stuff, holds the stitches in a really exacting way. But everything I've read says it gets all nice and soft the more you use it - so I'm making a simple little handtowel with it, to see how it holds up. My cotton handtowels are starting to pill up and look less pretty...though they've gotten constant use for...I'm not actually sure how long, but I suspect it's been like a year or so. And it was a pretty cheap cotton.


In any case, my neck is freaking killing me. I may have a better computer setup, but, that doesn't change my habit of leaning crazy close to the screen to better see the tiny details of what I'm doing. (ZOOM, MELISSA, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THAT IS WHY IT IS THERE!!11!) Also, I tend to lean around at weird angles when I'm using the tablet, which I was doing a lot tonight.

But yay I'm so glad I accomplished something. ^__________^