Yule Altar 2010

Aradia and I finally got around to setting up the Yule altar.  Last year, we focused a lot on the sun and the rebirth.  With the full moon coinciding this year, we decided to do a lot more balance.

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The centerpiece, which you can’t quite see in the photo, is a mask I made last year for the Summer and Winter solstices: black on one side and yellow on the other, with a solar disk on the brow and golden horns at the corners.  The seemingly out-of-place jug under the tree is honey destined for the Yule mead.

Stomach-soothing Ginger Tea

Something made me sick yesterday.  I’m not sure if it was the perhaps-too-old soup I had for lunch, or the reubens Aradia and I had for dinner Wednesday night.  Several friends recommended Kimchee – which, granted, I’ve been meaning to add to my fermentation experiments; it’s on the list after kimbucha – but I wasn’t willing to pour that into an already sour stomach.  So the Squirrel Bandit provided me with this:

Take a 3 inch thumb of ginger (do not bother to peel it -just cut off funky parts)and grate it or slice it into a small soup pot  and 6 cups water (2 cups if you are making syrup for later in the week). Boil until  the kitchen smells like ginger and the water gets yellowish, add 4 Tb honey and wait a few minutes. If you can handle it add 2 Tb lemon or lime juice.

Drink hot or add syrup to seltzer after chilling.

Tasty and soothing.

Coming out of Hibernation

Solstice approaches and the daylight wanes almost to nothing.  Here in Kansas City we’ve just had our first snow and our first night below 0F.  The semester is over, with only one final exam left between me and (hopefully) sounder sleep.  It seems as good a time as any to reacquaint myself with the world.

At 14,000 words my NaNoWriMo novel is neither a failure nor a success: in fewer than 20 days I doubled my fiction word count for the school year.  I’ve written one major and one minor paper in the last two weeks, the first of which I may share here. 

I’m working on my recipe for my Yule mead.  While searching for inspiration, I found a fantastic beginner’s recipe: http://www.moremead.com/mead_logs/Ancient_OCC.html

And while I’m sharing links, I found this while catching up on Chas Clifton’s blog: http://mysterytheater.blogspot.com/2010/10/free-classic-weird-fiction.html

Happy day, all.