Omorka's Lair

File under "Things we'll probably never get now": Oancitizen and Harvey Finevoice (or hell, just Kyle and Lewis) harmonizing.

Another memorial at Pagan's Night Out tonight, for our Fireman. We've lost entirely too many elders recently. (Don't smoke, kids, it'll kill ya.) Two members of Fire Crew were present, and it was obvious they're still grieving; he wasn't just a leader for that community, he was a quasi-parental figure for some of the younger ones whose blood-parents disapproved of their religion or sexuality.

It's hard, especially as such a spread-out community. We can't come together every week the way a 500-member church does. Yeah, we can get 50 of us together at one of the larger PNOs, like last month's or tonight's, but even then we're on the deck at a restaurant and not in a temple or on holy ground of our own. We need that, but who can afford it, and who would we all trust to take financial care of it?

Just FYI, I am hip-deep in Owlcon stuff and will continue to be so until the end of the con, which is late afternoon on Sunday. Will return to my usual Pagan and fannish stuff when the con is over.

This satsuma marmalade recipe works quite well. In fact, it works when tripled, although the time it takes to reach 220 degrees in my gigantic stockpot was closer to two and a quarter hours than 30-45 minutes.

In other news, I now have two jars of marmalade, and the dear friends who rented a house with a satsuma tree in the backyard now have twelve. They did not learn how to make and can marmalade, however, because they (a) weren't here last night for the part that involved two hours of chopping tangerines and lemons, picking out a billion seeds, and shredding tangerine and lemon peels; and (b) managed to miss the three hours of stirring a boiling stockpot of dismembered satsumas and lemons with sugar because their car broke down. Given that part of the purpose of this exercise was to teach J. how to make marmalade, this was not entirely a success.

Oh, and since they weren't here when I was jarring and then boiling-water processing the jars, I had to buy a flat of jam jars from Bullseye, and they now have an extra flat. They have strongly hinted that they now expect me to teach them how to make fig preserves when their fig tree sets fruit. Oy.

At least I got my two jars and the leftover satsumas out of it. I am vaguely contemplating making a second (much smaller) batch with the leftover satsumas and steeping some cloves, cinnamon, and vanilla bean in it during the soaking process. If I do, though, it'll be a few days, as I now have to do everything else I'd planned to do today tomorrow.

I have just about decided that I can't keep up with Tumblr and it's silly for me to try. Unfortunately, the Monkees fandom only seems to exist there and on Facebook, and I am not even attempting any fandom activity on Facebook; most of the people I have on there are either former students or family members. Most of the fanart end of the Channel Awesome/Chez Apocalypse famdom seems to be Tumblr-centric, too. *sigh*

I wish this sort of blogging-focused social networking was still popular. There are not words for how much I hate Facebook, and text posts more than three sentences long don't get responses on Tumblr. I don't mind Twitter, but it has pretty severe limitations and IMHO isn't much good for fandom stuff other than news and roleplaying. I end up writing twelve-tweet essays because of the character limit.

Ah, well. At least there are a few folks still left here. I'm going to attempt to journal more often this year, although a lot of the time that's likely to be the "altar log" type posts (which I should be doing more often anyway).

The end-of-semester crash-crunch has been interesting this year - very intense and very stressful, but at least I never felt out-of-control with it this year, unlike many of the last seven or so. Unfortunately, I kind of fell off the Earth social-media-wise for a little over a week there, and I left a couple of people hanging. Gotta see what I can do to patch that up over the next few days. I love my job, now more than ever, but wow, I need to get a better handle on grading.

My Fandom Stocking is here if anyone is inclined towards that sort of thing. My listed fandoms have shifted a bit in the last couple of years; I omitted some of the more obscure anime ones, for instance. Not that I have any less love for Mahou Tsukai Tai! or Escaflowne, but listing them makes me feel old. Anyway, I've signed up for one Monkees exchange and one TGWTG/CA one, but if anyone wants to subtly point me in the direction of stockings that need ficlet stuffers in fandoms I've written before, have at.

As for what I want non-fannishly for Yule (other than for a certain hotel/reality TV huckster to quit playing at politics and go away before he moves the Overton window permanently), the usual small things - nice yarn, nice teas, interesting cookbooks - all apply. I'm really not in the market for toys and games this year; I have too many I haven't played or played with sitting on the shelf. I do want a chiminea for the back patio-yard-lot-thing, but those are heavy and I want to pick it out myself. I also want a burr coffee grinder, as the tiny little blade grinder we inherited from the MiL is a piece of crap, but I can't find one at a reasonable price point, so I can't really ask for anyone else to get one for me - I might end up letting that be my gift from my parents.

Two more school days. Let's get this done.

I realized on Thursday that the frozen mixed cherries in the freezer had been there for nearly six months and were in danger of getting freezer burn, so I made a cherry pie (technically it's a cherry-berry pie, since the frozen cherry mix has a few blueberries and currants in there as well). I did a vented top instead of a lattice, which was probably a mistake since the top crust turned out a little bit soggy, but everything else turned out fine.

I have leftover apples from CMA that also need to turn into a pie before they go bad on me.

If I am not careful I will use up all my pie juju before Thanksgiving, but that might not be a terrible thing - it's likely to just be me, the Spouse, and the Boy this year. The usual three pies might be overkill.

*looks at the Yuletide tag set*

. . . I don't think I'm doing Yuletide this year.

Probably just as well; I don't know if I'll have free time in November. But disappointing all the same.

I probably will do fandom_stocking, although I don't know how many GB/RGB, Monkees, and/or TGWTG/CA folks it really has, and I'm not really doing much writing outside those three fandoms right now. Eh, I can probably get it together to write a few DW or MCU flashfics, at least.

My outdoor altar has been ransacked. The three candles were all knocked over and off of the altar, smashing one of them - the glass jars on the other two are intact. There's a smear of molten wax from the one that broke, but I think that's from it being in direct sunlight for part of the day before we found it. Both deity images (since this deity set was An and Ki, who are rarely if ever actually depicted in Sumerian art, they were printouts of a NASA Hubble image and a Mother Earth statue in a public park in Georgia) were tossed off of the altar, and one was slightly crumpled.

I have set up the two surviving candles on the folding camp table on the porch, swept up and unceremoniously disposed of the broken candle, sacrificially burned the desecrated images, and am laundering the altar bunting. I'll have to re-consecrate the altar and set out new images; under the circumstances, I might just choose a new deity set.

I don't know if this was accident/random vandalism, deliberate desecration, or the result of our neighborhood squirrels and raccoons (who I know do occasionally steal the food offerings) investigating whether the candles are edible. For the moment, I'm inclined to guess the latter, on the grounds that a deliberate desecration probably would have involved tearing up the deity images and we'd have likely heard it if a delivery person had knocked it over accidentally.

The bright side is that the offertory altarware - the cup, libation bowl, and plate - were not on the altar at the time and thus are safe. I removed them yesterday to wash them and decided to let them drip-dry instead of replacing them immediately; solid intuition on my part, there. But - uggghhh. This is so frustrating!

I had promised myself a long time ago that I would do this once I had finished my clerical training, but it is quite clear at this point that both the local community and the gods are perfectly happy to demand that I do the work of a priestess, and given the recent turns of events, the time seemed right. So, in addition to being a minor officer of the Council of Magickal Arts, a dedicant-priestess in the Blue Crescent tradition of Dianic Wicca, and a self-initiated priestess in the Chaldean Pagan tradition, I have officially gotten myself ordained through the Universal Life Church.

If you're not familiar with them, they're an organization that exists to provide ordination papers to people who don't have access to traditional Christian channels, primarily for the purpose of performing weddings (and, occasionally, funerals). The ordination itself is free, but they make money off of selling you various official-looking certificates, badges, bumper stickers, etc. It's a racket, but it's a happy and upfront one, and in the states with looser requirements for presiding over weddings, it's good enough. Texas happens to be one of those states.

So, anyway, if anyone needs a clergyperson who is fairly good at designing meaningful ritual and is more than happy to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies, I'm available.