Profanity-ridden post the first.

...remember, some of you ASKED me to blog the move. The rest of you may wanna skip this one.

The husbeast went by PSD (Personnel Support Detachment, or Pinheaded Shitforbrains Dickheads, depending on your viewpoint) this morning to check on the status of our move.

We don't have one.

Some motherfucking shithead moron asshole lost our paperwork - or more likely, never filed it in the first place - and so we have NOTHING. No schedule, no movers coming, no trucks, no packers. For contrast, on the last two moves (to and from Hawaii), we had pack-out dates scheduled months ahead. In the case of our move TO Hawaii, it was my first 'international' move (Hawaii is considered overseas due to distance, even though it's obviously still part of the US) and I was paranoid and had our pack-out date scheduled SIX MONTHS IN ADVANCE. This time? WE ARE A WEEK AWAY AND THANKS TO FUCKHEAD THE WONDER MONKEY IN PSD WE STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IN THE BLUE HOLY HELL IS GOING ON.

We have a pretty cool landlord who would let us stay through August, if it comes down to it. But if we do that, we'll have to pay out over a thousand dollars in another month's rent, not to mention utilities and all that. WHICH I WILL THEN TAKE OUT OF THE HIDE OF WHOEVER AT PSD IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS GOAT FUCKING RODEO.

PSD claims they will have this straightened out by Monday. Considering that as of last week they had me living in Honolulu (we had to fix that so they'd pay to move me and my stuff from South Carolina to Ohio), considering this is already the second time we've filed our move paperwork and the second time it's been lost, I have very little faith.

The husbeast goes back Monday to deal with this. He plans to be "Mr. Not Nice Guy" as he puts it. I told him if that doesn't work, tell them he's sending in his wife.

Someone get me a slice of cake and a martini.

And then, photography.

I've been looking up information on cyanogenic glycosides found in Rosaceae species and almost wrote a blog post on it, but I'm afraid people will come after me with pitchforks and torches if I seriously start in on the organic chem, so... another topic from left field!

A couple days ago, we were looking around for ways to keep the Goober entertained. It's so hot here we can't take her outside for very long unless we're spraying water on her. So, anyway, I grabbed the backup digital camera, gave it to the kid, and turned her loose. (This is the camera that I threw across the yard into a tree while falling down the porch steps last summer, if any long-term readers remember that fun-filled extravaganza.) She wandered around the house taking photos. We found out that this camera will take between 150 and 200 flash photos before the batteries give out. Once the batteries are dead, she's done for the day.

So here you go, photography from the Goober (for those of you on Facebook and Twitter, these photos are mostly different than the ones I put up there; I included the teddy bears again 'cause it's just so damn cute). She did all the framing and focus and posing and setup and everything. All I did was hand her the camera and show her how to turn it on and 'poosh da button'.

Stevia.

(More Plant Freak News, by request. Still knitting, still spinning, still in denial about move. Blah blah.)


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Stevia is the new big-deal ooh-ah in industrial agriculture. It is a sweetener; not quite artificial, but not quite sugar either. Cargill is marketing it under the name "Truvia" and that's probably the state most of us have encountered it in (except for you wild people growing it).


Stevia is a shrubby little group of plants in the Aster family, meaning they are related not only to asters, but sunflowers, safflower, lettuce, artichokes, and, well, asters are one of the largest families of flowering plants, so there's a hell of a lot of them. Stevia in particular is native to central America, and has been used as a sweetener, medicine, and food, by the people in the area for time out of mind. It has been known in the west/European-settled world since 1899.

I was told in hort class that one of the things that really slowed the industrialization and widespread use of Stevia was the domestication of it. Supposedly, the plant is very sensitive to daily light cycles and won't grow well in areas with markedly different cycles. However, I can't find any mention of that quirk on the internet in articles I'm looking at, and all my botany books are in boxes in Ohio, so take it as you will.

The big, huge, raging controversy over Stevia is the same one that rages around all the 'artificial' sweeteners: safety. Rather, whether the sugar lobbyists are having the other sweeteners declared unsafe to cover their own asses. Stevia has been used for over thirty years in Japan with no ill effect, yet in 1985 (at that point Japan had been using it for fourteen years), the FDA declared it unsafe in the US. This prompted people to accuse the FDA of taking sugar industry money, and the snarling went back and forth until in 2008 they 'reviewed' the studies and decided that, no, Stevia was safe, after all.

Which makes a person wonder if the government cares more about our safety or corporate dollars, but that's a rant for another post.

WARNING: CHEMISTRY AHEAD

The sweetness in Stevia is due to a glycoside called, originally enough, "Steviol glycoside". (Those silly chemists. When will they name something 'Fred'?) Glycosides are a big group of organic molecules that break down into a sugar and something else. For instance, cyanogenic glycosides break down into sugar and cyanide (these are the toxic chemicals in unroasted almonds and apple seeds and peach pits and the like). Get it? The steviol glycoside breaks down into glucose (the sugar) and steviol (the something else). Everyone is arguing over the safety of the steviol. I'll ease back on the chemistry, but steviol is a member of ANOTHER group of chemicals named diterpenes which are not the healthiest things in the world (diterpenes are the chemicals in coffee that make doctors tell you to cut back on it).

On the other hand, Stevia doesn't trigger the insulin whiplash that regular cane sugar does, is low-carb, and may help reduce blood pressure. So, as with so many things, I suspect the good and bad mostly balance each other out, and you should do that tiresome old grown-up thing and exercise moderation with the stuff, just like you would with 'real' sugar.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or a perfect sweetener.

For those who were asking, Stevia is heat-stable, meaning you can bake with it. And it doesn't ferment; I assume yeasts can't break down the glycosides to get at the sugar, and they just sit there.

On a personal note, I've used Truvia to sweeten my morning tea (my mother-in-law uses it and I just finished drinking a big whack of it while staying at her house in Ohio) and it's kinda weird. There are mentions of it in the literature. Since there has to be a chemical reaction to break down the glycoside, the actual taste of the sweetness is kind of delayed. When I use it in my tea, I swallow the tea and THEN get a zing of 'sweet' in my mouth. Not unpleasant, but kinda strange. I'm thinking I need to try this stuff in cookies and see what happens. I'll keep you posted.

I really like knitting.

Yes! Finally! A blog post about knitting! Please do try not to swoon.

So, back in the ancient past when I was in high school, my friends and I had this phrase, copped from Homer Simpson ("I really like beer"). We occasionally applied it to beer, yes, but it was just as often applied to the other really obvious pleasures in life, "I really like cookies" "I really like broken in Levis". You get the idea.

Today, I really like knitting.

This is "Cameo" from Wendy Bernard.

Well, the start of it. I'm tweaking it a bit - we all know how that goes - but the knitting itself is chugging along smoothly. I've got to hand it to Wendy. She can write the hell out of a pattern. I've tweaked and mooshed and short-rowed this pattern, but she wrote it so clearly that it's STILL coming together beautifully. And because it's top down, I tried it on today to figure out where that all-important length is: the underside of my boobs, where I am starting the ribbing in the hopes the fabric will suck in and show off what waist I've got. No way I'd be able to do that knitting bottom up. I'd stress and measure twenty times and count and re-count and still get it wrong. This way? I know I got it. No stress. Just happy, lovely, endless knitting.

I started the ribbing today, dug in with a bunch of episodes of Eureka, and got this much done.



I'm in total denial about this move. Every morning I get up and think "I need to start sorting things, and making lists..." and then I spend the day knitting or spinning. The move will be hell, but it's great for my productivity.

Done!

The pound of wool has been spun up, to a little less than 1200 yards of woolly goodness.

That's actually not the ENTIRE pound; there's one skein left waiting to be washed. But it's plied and wound on the niddy-noddy, so the spinning is done. (Roxie, sorry I didn't get a photo of the spun yarn back inside the container that held that huge wad of wool at the start of this adventure; the container is in Ohio, full of more wool, carbon fiber, and llama. But it takes up roughly one fifth the volume the roving did.)

So what did I learn? I can't get enough yardage out of a pound of wool to make a sweater. At least not at three-ply sock weight. I'm thinking two-ply lace weight might do it. So that's the plan for the Bells Fiber. After I practice another year or ten at spinning lace weight singles until they're perfectly smooth. I also learned I can spin a pound of wool in about a month, which blows me away.

I celebrated by immediately starting something else.

This will be the Spice Cake lace weight. The other ply is going to be a spicy-colored tweed. I'm going to see how much yardage I can get out of HALF a pound, this time. It'll be interesting to see how much time it takes.

ETA: Yes, this new spinning project will, eventually, be up for sale on the Etsy shop. It's more merino.

Poppies, opium and other.

(Still got nothing to blog, you're all stuck with another topic out of left field. Enjoy!)

As a once and future botany student and an all-around plant freak, the USES of plants - usually broken down into industrial, medical, and food - have always fascinated me. In particular the 'weird' plants, the ones with unusual qualities, have interested me. This blog post was almost about Stevia, but we're going back to one of the original plants that got me curious about botany in the first place.

Meet the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. Also known as the garden poppy, common poppy, and a whole buncha other names in other languages.

When I was a kid, my parents had a bird feeder in the back dining room window. They filled it with mixed bird seed, and so every spring we would have plants grow from seeds dropped by the birds. Sunflowers and poppies were the two biggies. Usually my mother weeded out the sunflowers and let the poppies stay, although once in a while she would get a wild hair and let the sunflowers grow and they'd eventually block out the light in the dining room and we'd sit and eat dinner while watching birds duke it out over the sunflower seeds.

Anyway, when I got a little older, I remember looking at those poppies and wondering if they were, you know, REAL poppies. That made DRUGS. (This was before I understood how truly common 'drug' plants are - little did I know they were all over the place.) So I looked them up. I think poppies were the first plant I ever looked up.

It's entirely possible the poppies in Mom's flower beds were opium poppies. It's entirely possible the poppies in your flower beds are, too. They grow as weeds, 'wayside plants', in a great deal of the world, particularly Europe and Asia. And while it is possible to cultivate them for opium production in any temperate climate, the reality is that you'd need acres of them - and a good bit of cheap labor - to make any kind of money at it.

Opium poppies are native to central asia, near as we can tell. They were known to a lot of ancient civilizations - even in the middle east, we've got Sumerian pots (those wacky Sumerians) with pictures of opium poppies on them, that are about five thousand years old. (I'd love to know if they've tried to analyze what was in those pots.) They were likely domesticated very early - we don't know how early, but usually if there's no date, that means REALLY early. Of course they are still grown all through central asia, in some places for food, in some places for medical use, and in some places for sale as illegal drugs.

There is a lot of misinformation flying around about how illegal drugs fund terrorism, but in the case of illegal opium, it really is likely funding terrorism. It is the cash crop of the Taliban in Afghanistan, among other groups.

So to make opium, first, you grow yourself a couple hundred acres of poppies. (From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, I bet that's really beautiful.) Wait until they flower. Pull off the petals (or wait until they drop), and make a slice into the bulb of the flower head. Latex (gummy sap) will ooze out and dry, like this:

Go along every day and scrape off the dried latex and put it in a little jar; either re-cut the flower head, or make sure the current cut is still oozing. Move on to the next flower. (These flowers grow knee to waist high, so imagine doing this all day, bent over.) The latex is then refined by various chemical methods to separate out different chemicals.

I've always been pretty dismissive of the idea of major opium cultivation in the US: no one is willing to do the work involved. Much easier to cook meth. Young kids today. No work ethic. Ha.

Poppy latex is said to contain between forty and a hundred and twenty different alkaloids, including opium, morphine, codeine, and thebaine. (Alkaloids are a class of chemicals that are very reactive in the body; other alkaloids include nicotene, caffeine, cocaine, ephedrine, LSD, and THC, though those aren't in poppies. A very interesting group of chemicals.) What the DEA doesn't want you to know is, these alkaloids are found in ALL poppies, not just opium poppies - it's just that opium poppies contain the most, and are therefore the best choice for mass production.

As for opium and addiction, well. I'm not advocating the use of illegal drugs, but the alkaloids found in poppies are not only the most ancient (that we know of) painkillers in the world, but they are still the best we've ever found. Even in this modern age of engineered drugs, we fall back on our old friend the opium poppy for major pain control. Yes, it does cause physical dependence, but that's not the big deal it's made out to be. Many drugs cause physical dependence, including western society's most favorite legalized drug - caffeine. I won't get on my soap box today about dependence vs. addiction, but I'm tired of drugs being called bad or good on the basis of physical dependence. Particularly since the person talking probably had a cup of tea or coffee that morning.

On a sentimental note, there is a followup to my story of looking up poppies as a kid. About twenty years later, while studying botany in Hawaii, I was walking to class one day and noticed this plant, growing up out of a bed of weeds. It had the distinctive silver-green pointy foliage of poppies, and the flowers, while white, sure looked familiar. It was right outside the door of my horticulture professor's classroom, so I ducked in the door, pointed, and said, "Is that a POPPY?" She grinned and nodded and explained that not only was it a poppy, it was a Hawaiian poppy, pua kala. Somehow we'd had a fairly rare (really rare on Oahu, where we were) native Hawaiian plant pop up, right outside our horticulture classroom.

I like to think the poppies that my mother grew sent a relative to say hello. But I'm sentimental over plants.

The light at the end of the tunnel!

And it isn't oncoming traffic.

I am fucking thrilled to report that this is all that's left of the Purple Trainwreck:

About one bobbin's worth. I'm hoping to have it knocked out by the end of the week and then start on something not purple. (Two-ply lace weight I've tentatively named "Spice Cake", but we have to see what it looks like plied. It might be "Chai Tea" or possibly "Cinnamon Toast".) After that, I'm not sure what I'm spinning. Perhaps I will crawl off into a corner and knit two traditional Norwegian sweaters, considering I've got them 'due' at Christmas and I meant to have one knit by now.

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In other news, I was the victim of a bad haircut at the end of last week. I had it colored at the same time (like the color), so I had to wait a while to let the color 'set' before I washed it and saw what the damage really was. It's bad. "A little shorter" somehow translated into the hairdresser going Edward Scissorhands on me and lopping off five-inch lengths of the top layer of my hair. Now I don't know about you, but 'a little shorter' doesn't equal five inches in my universe. I've been bitching about this for days over on Twitter, and there were demands for photos, so, well, here you go.

The only one who will fully appreciate the horror is Terby, who has seen me fairly regularly in real life and knows I usually wear it shoulder length and fairly sleek. NOT in the Billy Idol meets Rod Stewart chrysanthemum cut circa 1986. I've got too many cowlicks to be wearing it this short. One nap and it stands on end.

I'd cut it into a mohawk, but it'd just take that much longer to grow out.

And I'm not sure what another color, say pink, on top of the recent color job would do. But the cut is probably eighties enough.