Beth Skwarecki

and this:



and this:



Find out what Yellowstone looks like tomorrow.

We went to the state fair.



There were chickens ...



... and even multicolored chickens ...



... but my favorite hairdos were on the ducks.



When chickens have ridiculous multi-colored hairdos, they really look the part. Like, "I'm a rock star!" or "I'm a clown!" But the ducks don't really get into the character. They're like "I'm a duck." A duck with a great hairdo, that is.

I caught a sheep mid-baa:



and some pigs during their nap:



These guys were really rocking their harmonicas



and these seals were trained to plop their heads on anybody who posed for a picture.



I can't forget the butter sculpture



but most amazing of all is the tiny state fair inside the state fair.



I looked, but I couldn't find a tinier state fair inside of it.

More photos are here. The state fair website is here, but you can't see it for yourself until next year.

I love to travel, and I love to fly. Sure, the seats are cramped, the planes are often late, and the TSA staff perpetually uptight and cranky, but you just can't beat ACTUALLY FLYING through the ACTUAL AIR as a method of transportation. It's like an amusement park ride that lasts for hours, and gives you a chance to catch up on your reading.

As a kid, my family lived in a USAir hub city and every flight was a nonstop. Now, I live in a little podunk town and have to take three or four planes for every trip. There's nothing like landing hungry and thirsty, looking forward to a nice lunch, when your plane is late and you only have five minutes to run to another terminal to catch the next flight.

So I learned, early in my podunk traveling days, to always bring a full water bottle with me to the airport. (To keep with the times, I now bring an empty bottle, and find a water fountain as soon as I'm through security.) And on those long, lunchless flights, a bag of scones stuffed in your carry-on is a lifesaver. It doesn't even matter if they get crushed; the crumbs taste just as good.

I have a hard time predicting whether I'll get hungry for food or hungry for candy, so for today's flight I made half my scones sweet and the other half savory. Don't let the unknown scare you: the savory cheese scones smelled almost like a pizza coming out of the oven, attracting both dogs and people to the kitchen, even the people whose reaction was "you put CHEESE in your SCONES?". They quickly changed their tune!

You can whip up these scones in just a few minutes, so long as you have heavy cream in your fridge; no need to soften any butter or bother with eggs or oil. The cream is the secret ingredient, making the scones light and fluffy. They'll be fluffier the less you stir the cream, so if you're using a mixer, only turn it on for a few short seconds.

I firmly believe that these scones are, if not healthy, at least better for you than anything you'd get at the airport newsstand on your way to your gate. Feel free to vary the ingredients. Scallions go particularly well in cheese scones; fruity scones are delicious with lemon juice in place of the vanilla extract.

These two half-batches can replace breakfast and lunch for 1-2 ravenous travelers, with some left over. If you're staying home, that works out to 12-18 medium sized scones to eat at your leisure.

Sweet cranberry oatmeal scones

• 1/2 pint cream
  
• 1/2 cup sugar
  
• 1 tbsp baking powder
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 1/2 cup quick oats
  
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries (or try other dried fruits or nuts)
  
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
  
• 1.5 cups flour
  

Preheat the oven to 350, and mix all ingredients except the flour. Slowly mix in the flour to make a fluffy dough. (You may have some flour left over; that's fine.)

Transfer the dough to a baking sheet, and pat it into a round cake. Cut the cake into triangles, as you would a pizza (or form the shapes of your choice, say round or square), and space the scones equally on the sheet. Bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes, or until the corners just start to turn golden-brown.

Savory cheese scones

• 1/2 pint cream
  
• 1 tbsp baking powder
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
  
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
  
• 1/2 tsp dried basil
  
• 1/2 cup grated pepper jack or sharp cheddar cheese
  
• 1.5 cups of flour (I used half white flour and half wheat)
  

Prepare as for sweet scones, mixing the flour in last, and dividing the dough into triangles or the shapes of your choice. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes, or until the corners just start to turn golden-brown.

For such a short trip, I sure spent a lot of time in airports. I even nodded off on a plane for the first time ever. (Usually I can't sleep on planes even if I want to).

I sort of organized a herd of cats perl hackers into meeting for dinner. We went to a Malaysian restaurant called Penang (it's the first restaurant you'll see from the train stop in Chinatown). The food was delicious, and the table had a lazy susan thing in the middle. There were ten of us, and everybody shared, so I had a delicious vegetable curry, chili tofu, mango tofu, tofu with peanuts and vegetables, and so many other tasty things I can't recall. Peanut pancakes for dessert, and coconuts to drink. (They THWACK a coconut with a cleaver, peel the lid back, and you drink what's inside with a straw). I didn't have one, but I seemed to impress most of the table with my ability to drink bubble tea without gagging. (I guess that's a rare skill.)

I left my camera at home to save space in my bag. My rationale was "I didn't take pictures of anything interesting last year". Turns out I have another good reason: everybody else is taking pictures, so I don't have to!

Today I packed the lightest I've ever packed for a 5-day trip: 4 sets of shirts/underwear/etc; toiletries; laptop/phone/ipod all with chargers and spare batteries; and a bunch of knitting to keep me busy while in transit. Total volume: One messenger bag that fits easily beneath an airplane seat. Woohoo! The only things I chose to leave behind were my camera, my swimsuit, and a couple of skirts/pants. (It's OK, I still have enough to clothe me for the week).

The conference starts for real tomorrow. I expect to have so much fun I forget to blog it. Wish you were here.

I can't believe I went to a natural dyeing workshop and didn't bring my camera!

I had a great time. We dyed with madder, indigo, and weld (plus a few other additives) and came up with a blood red, a light orange-red, a bright yellow, a bright grassy green, a dark blue, a grayish color (it was supposed to be a light blue but something went wrong), a dark blackish purple, and a deep chocolate brown. I'll post pictures of the skeins once I've washed them.

My coworkers also had a great time, since they got to say things like "Beth couldn't come to work today. She's dyeing."

The workshop was taught by Mehmet Girgic from Turkey. (He had some of his carpets there, and they were just amazing.) It was held by Theresa at Woodscape Artistry in Oneonta, NY. If they do this workshop again it will probably be spread out over 2-3 days. Ideally you mordant the wool and prepare the dyebath on Day 1, and then dye the wool on Day 2. Mehmet also says that a good purple takes two days.

I've been shopping for dyes so I can experiment on my own. The Dharma Trading Co. has madder and indigo, but none in stock right now (sad story - their supplier died. His daughter is taking over the business). Maiwa has madder and indigo in stock, but you can't order online. I haven't found a source for weld yet, so maybe I'll try some other yellow, like marigold.

I have so many pictures of the stuff I saw this weekend at the Strolling of the Heifers in Vermont. Here's a peek:


A strolling heifer.

Of course I had to knit something in the car:


We visited an alpaca farm. Chris bought the fleeces from (I think) these two cuties:


That's it for now. More later, when I'm less tired, or more tired, or not sneezing as much or something. (I think I've either got allergies or a cold. Not sure which, but it's unpleasant.)

I've been perusing some travel-related sites (inspired by onebag.com, the likes of which I will post about soon).

I've always liked browsing through travel gear - the items are often unusual, ingenious, and cute. Some of them skeeve me out, though, and not just because they're only available in taupe.

I guess it's because people who can afford to travel a lot, and can afford to buy special gear to do it with, tend to be old rich hypochondriacs. Or something. Do you really need "money socks" that hold that third copy of every paper you own? Do people in foreign countries really want your important documents that much? The "security" section of any travel-gear website showcases more paranoia than the Loompanics catalog. A doorstop alarm for your hotel room? Security wallets for a dozen different body parts?

I digress. That's not what skeeves me out. What skeeves me out are things like the SeatWrap, which covers your entire airplane seat so you don't have to touch fabric that somebody else's butt has touched. Or how about the (taupe) I Can Breathe Mask that protects your delicate nasal passages from "exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke". But, of course, only while you're traveling - foreign exhaust fumes must be worse than the domestic kind. Meanwhile, the SnacPac silverware kit protects you from the "iffy" silverware provided by restaurants everywhere but home.

I wonder if European travel catalogs sell iffy silverware to use when traveling to America.

Yesterday I biked 25 miles.

After work Teri and I rode from Cornell, through downtown, and up 96 on the other side of the lake. 96 goes uphill for several miles. We passed things that always seemed so far away when we drove to them, like the Museum of the Earth. We got to the place where the cycling club was supposed to meet, couldn't find them, and decided to bike on our own up to Taughannock falls. We asked for directions (twice), and followed them to the lower end of the park (on the level with the bottom of the falls). The lower trail isn't open to bicyclists, and the refreshment stand was closed for the day. Bored with that, we decided to check out the overlook 200 or so feet up. (That was a bigger hill than we expected. I think Teri almost died.)

The falls were gone. We're having a dry summer, and there wasn't enough water in the creek. One tourist, getting into his car, asked me "You pedaled all the way up here for this?"

While we were hanging out, talking, preparing for our ride back downhill, a group of cyclists coasted in. We recognized some of their jerseys. They were the ride we tried to meet up with, only we had the wrong time. We talked to a rider who suggested that we had taken a more hilly route than their ride ever would (well, they are the beginners' ride), and that there is a ridge between 89 and 96, so that by going from the latter to the former we went down a big hill that we had to come back up later. He said we had probably gone up 1400 feet, elevation-wise, since leaving downtown.

So we rode back with the club. Before we left work, we didn't know if we'd make it to the meeting place alive, much less be able to keep up with the group. Now it turns out we had taken a more strenuous route than they had, and we were able to stay towards the front of the pack on the ride home. Go us!

I recently learned how to stencil on T-shirts. (I just had to have an SGN Metal shirt, and inkjet transfers can't do white-on-black.)

This shirt is based on the sheep stencils we saw as graffiti in Reykjavík. I saw a few Icelanders wearing these sheep on their t-shirts, but could never find one in any tourist t-shirt shops. That's just as well, though. I made mine for $7 plus a few cents worth of freezer paper and fabric paint. That kind of money, in Iceland, wouldn't go any farther than 4 or 5 postcards.








close-up photos here.

As Chris and I drove through Iceland, we saw at least as many horses as we saw sheep. That's a lot of horses.

We went riding twice, both times crossing lava fields near the mountains (the inland portion of Iceland is all mountain). Since they're different from most horses you'll see outside of Iceland, I thought I'd say a little bit about them.

They're short (around 13 hands) and fat, but nobody calls them ponies. They are horses, hestarnir. They just happen to be conveniently within reach of the ground, so you don't need a mounting block to get on them. And if you ride through tall grass, the grass may brush your boots.

As you'd expect from reading about them, the horses were strong, sure-footed, and after a while you start to think of them as the normal size for horses to be (we never saw any tall horses in Iceland, anyway). They scrambled over rocks, up hills, across streams, and over various other terrains that I felt sure we would fall onto. Other things you'll commonly hear about Icelandic horses are that they are good-natured and smooth-gaited. This is mostly true: the first horse I rode was good-natured, and the second was smooth-gaited. :)

In place of the trot, the faster sections of our trail rides were done at a tölt, a gait that one guide explained to me as a four-beat gait similar to a pace, but slower and smoother. It differs from the faster "flying pace" in that the tölt has no period of suspension.

Icelandic horses' saddles are placed further back than I'm used to. I was instructed to put one hand on the biggest lump of muscle on the shoulders, then my other hand next to that, and finally the saddle. Many of the horses wore cruppers to keep the saddle from slipping any more forward than that.

According to the Internet, in 982 the Icelandic parliament (the Alþing, which still exists) passed a law prohibiting horses from being imported into Iceland. This apparently had to do with controlling the spread of disease. Icelandic horses can still be exported, though, and you'll find farms selling and breeding Icelandic horses all over the world (a quick google turns up several in the US and Canada).