Herbs! Herbs of Doom!

So I went away for the weekend and before I left, I glanced at the herb garden as I was filling its water tank and went...nah, it's ok for now. No Pollei harvest required (that is to say, done while on the way out the door like a thundering herd of turtles) (that probably tells you more than my mum wants you to know- still not quite sure how she survived my formative years).

Now, however, I could ignore it no longer. The cilantro was starting to creep into the couch, and the mint was beginning to reach for the door. (it's the most anemic mint I've ever seen. nothing like the mint I planted in the little pot outside, that laughed in the face of october, when the basil succumbed to colder evening temperatures, and then laughed in the face of november- at least until the scale insects (I think that's what they were, wee little flappy fidgety things that left the leaves and stems all shiny, although there were also a big crop of aphids and a few shiny golden aphidy looking things, although The Internet tells me that golden aphids aren't anywhere near me, geographically and climatologically speaking, although me + plants...you never know.) moved in and took everything over. even then, as I was ripping out roots (I'm going to plant a jasmine bush! ...don't look at me like that, james.) I saw some squared-off stubbornly green minty runners.) This mint has tiny little stemlets and very airily-spaced leaves, which are also minute. I'm sure that's just a function of the aerogarden's developers mucking about with the mint so that, towards the end of the herb garden lifecycle, they didn't have mint, parsley mint, two kinds of basil mint, cilantro mint, dill mint, and chives mint. (still. it's weird looking at it.)

(...that right there -^ is why Mrs Josephs threatened to make me buy parentheses in high school. it is so not my fault. I blame Cicero. parenthetical phrases in parenthetical phrases in parenthetical phrases in a foreign (dead!) language without punctuation in a legal defense spiel. yeah. my convoluted grammatical structure is "see jane. see jane run. run, jane, run." in comparison, and is merely a representation of my mental processes. and if you dare point out that Mrs Josephs was 10th grade and Cicero was college, I shall point accusingly at my lineage.)

I am currently constructing one of the most non-Kosher meal I can think of- teriyaki marinated pork tenderloin with mushroom risotto with a bacon-maple syrup glaze- which is ok, because The Boy and I are neither of us Jewish and we aren't expecting company. it's pretty non-Halal (Halam? Haram? I can't remember the word for non-halal), too, except that to my knowledge it's ok to have meat + dairy in the same meal/at the same time. Again, not that that makes any difference to us. But it popped into my head when I was putting away the icing that I used to make cookies and saw the little K mark and went...duh...sugar + water + food coloring, how can it not be kosher? (and then I remembered that animal-based gelatins = bad, and while you'd still not expect them to be in icing, you never know with the candy industry.) and it's Friday, so it's good that The Boy and I aren't Catholic.

Anyway. I digress. A lot. (see aforementioned mention of 'indicative of my mental state'.)

The yarn I got for aunt helen's scarf is almost perfect. the colors look great and I love the fact that the colorway I want to do to knit a haida/tlingit styled raven is called 'haida.'

just one problem.

it's superwash.

in a felted scarf.

...this could be a problem. My task after finishing food and finishing my lab (curse you, physics!!!...oh, physics. physics, physics, physics...that's a blog post of a different color. one requiring looots of -OH groups. preferably dark, pint-sized, with a thick creamy 'stach-inducing head.) is to peer around the blue moon fiber arts website and see if they don't make a non-superwash yarn in that colorway.

although that's for after a bit of cleaning.