OK, so traditionally greens are cooked with some pork, right? Except I do not eat pigs. But I tried to recreate the taste of traditional greens. I don't know how authentic tasting this is but it tastes good and is nutritious.

Take 1 block tofu and press it by putting it on your cutting board and putting a plate and a heavy cook book on top. Meanwhile wash and coarsely chop about 3 lbs kale. Make a sauce by mixing in a small bowl 1/3 c water, 2 tbsp soy sauce, and a generous dash of liquid smoke.

Take the tofu and cut it into 1" cubes. Put 1 tbsp oil in wok and fry the tofu until golden brown. Pour the sauce over the tofu and cook until all the liquid evaporates. Now add the kale and cook until tender (sometimes enough water clings to the leaves to cook it but I usually have to add a little water). If you like, douse with Bufalo Chipotle Sauce to make it smokier and hotter.

Eat with cornbread and pinto beans.

Quite a few, so there will be sub-headings.

First: Chickens: The chicks are all still alive and growing quickly and eating me out of house and home. They also get into everything and then make tragic peeping noises.
Here's a cute story: Last week I moved something in the henhouse and some beetles that had been hiding underneath ran out; the chicks made panicked peeps so the hen ran over to see what was going on and then started eating the beetles, and then the chicks tried catching the beetles too. It was very sweet.
To show their growth, here's a photo I took last week:



And here they are today (it is cold and drizzly and they want to hide under the hen, so this is the best I could get):



They are much bigger and have more feathers!

I've done a lot of knitting!

I am SO FUCKING HAPPY to have finished this sweater! I like the sweater but knitting it was such a pain -- I now know never to do a flat-knit fair isle sweater ever again.



See how happy I am?
YAYYYYY

I also finished this scarf, which included not just knitting but also spinning as well!



I lost track of how many projects I've finished now!
ETA: I just checked and it's 7 out of 18. Yeah!

I also made a scarf for my sister but I forgot to take a photo of it. It doesn't count towards my knitting goal because I started it even though I am not supposed to be starting new projects.

I've done lots and lots of yardwork!

Here is a flower bed we made in March, it is kicking butt:



The grass needs to be cut, but in the course of doing yardwork, I cleverly locked the key to the toolshed inside of the toolshed. So we can't get at the lawnmower for the time being.

I made this rose:



Also, an amaryllis:



I planted a great deal of beans and they are growing nicely but not terribly photogenic.

Other stuff happened!

Tulio went to Honduras for 3 weeks and I was sad and lonely but had a lot of knitting time. Patchy played some soccer:



I've lost 17 pounds since Jan 1st; this month I started weight training and haven't lost a pound this whole month, but I'm a lot smaller, so I think I'm building more muscle? I've been hiking pretty much every weekend, and it's been awesome.

(FYI: I had to buy a new hoe over the weekend and I managed to complete this transaction without giggling once)

Chicks are very stressful!

I got home and the dog and I ran outside to see what the chicks were up to -- the stupid mother hen had somehow gotten out of the fenced-in box and was sitting in the nest hole, which is FINE, I support her right to raise her chicks where ever she wants to, EXCEPT that the holes in the fence are big enough for a chick to fit through, and to prove my point one of the chicks immediately popped out of the fence, and the dog promptly picked it up.
I yelled "NO! DROP IT!" and for the first time ever the dog actually complied, and the chick was just fine.

I have one of those under-the-bed storage boxes (full of yarn, of course), so I moved the hen and chicks into that (the yarn is strewn across the guest bed now, if you were wondering), because I think the sides are too high for the chicks to get out. The hen was angry, but she will have to cope.

I went by Barnes supply and they did have proper chick waterers so I got one of those, so that's one stressor off my mind. Also, the chick starter feed must be made out of crack, seriously, I can't keep the hens out of it.

I have been doing more things than obsessing over chickens! I finished several knitting projects and I've done a ton of gardening, and I go hiking every weekend, and I invented a new recipe. Someday I'll even post about those things! Or maybe not!

Woke up this morning to find a fourth chickie!




I made them a nice brooder box. Poor little guys were cold so they are huddling together. It's a cowboy hat box because we are classy and have such things kicking around our house.



Mother hen is like WILL YOU LEAVE US ALONE ALREADY?



Introducing them to food and water!



Mother hen is like SERIOUSLY. FUCK OFF.



Heading back under mom, where it's safe and warm and there are no camera flashes:



This one little guy was really into the food, though!



Greedy ass hens ate all the chick crumbles, though. I'm ok with Momma Hen eating it because she really lost a lot of weight while broody, but the other hen has no business eating the chickie food. I found a random piece of fence in the yard so I blocked off the brooder box with it so the other hen can't get to the chickies or their food.

The 5th egg still hasn't hatched, but I'm going to leave it in there a few more days, just in case. Also, I think the hen ate the eggshells from the hatched chicks, because I can't figure out where else they would have gone.

I need to figure out a better water system. A magazine article recommended a saucer with marbles (the marbles keep them from falling in the water and drowning), but it doesn't hold enough, especially since the hen drinks out of it too. They didn't have any chick waterers at the feed store. I was thinking about adapting a humming bird feeder, any other ideas?

I went out this morning and moved Broody Hen to see what was up, and one of the eggs had a little hole in it and was peeping! I ran to the feed store and burst in like "MY CHICKS ARE HATCHING AND I NEED STARTER FEED!!!!!!" and they were all blase, "yeah, it's right over there."
When I got home the egg looked like this:



Honestly kinda gross

And then Broody Hen ran over to protect the egg from me.



But then! A little later it looked like this!
Well, hello there!



And here comes the hen to protect her baby again:



And after a while, there was a second chick, all slimy and gross. And then a few hours later, there were 2 cute fluffy chicks and a 3rd slimy chick! One of the remaining eggs has a little hole in it but hasn't progressed any further, and the 5th egg isn't doing a damn thing, so far at least.

Here is a content hen with some chickies:



And, so she doesn't feel left out, here is Not Broody Hen, eating some millet.



I made a lovely brooder box out of a cowboy hat box and filled it with aspen shavings, a dish of chick feed, and a dish filled with marbles and water (if you just give chicks a dish of water they drown in it, but they can stick their beaks between the marbles). I put the box next to Broody Hen so she can get used to it, and will move them in tomorrow.

I have to make a brooder box, but here is a photo of the chickies who have hatched so far! 2 more of the eggs were pipping last time I checked, so there could actually be more chicks by now! So exciting!

In the chicken world, things have become utterly fascinating! (In my opinion anyway. My coworkers did sort of politely discourage me from talking about my hen today).
One of the hens went broody and made a nice nest behind the henhouse door and sits there on the eggs making noises like an angry cat when you try to collect them. So I thought she might enjoy having some actual fertilized eggs that would actually hatch. Where do you find such a thing? Craigslist, of course! So this past weekend I drove out to Hillsborough where a very nice lady with some particularly attractive chickens sold me 5 eggs. There's no guarantee they're fertilized, of course, but she has 3 roosters in with 5 hens, so that's good odds, as roosters are horny bastards. The chickens are a rare breed, blue laced red wyandottes (you should do a google image search because they are cool). So I took the eggs home, and tried really hard to slip them under Broody Chicken without her noticing, but she did somehow notice and was very offended and jumped up and ran around for a bit. So I put them in her nest hole and left her alone and she soon afterwards settled down on them.
And there she's sat since. It rained very hard last night and I was really concerned that she would abandon the eggs, but I went out to check and she was sleeping on top of the eggs with her head tucked under her wing, very cute.
Here she is doing her thing:



The drawback to all this is that we no longer have eggs to eat. Broody hen has stopped laying so she can devote all her attention to her clutch of eggs, and for some reason the other hen has also stopped laying and is honestly acting a great deal like a rooster.

I have learned a great deal about chicks in the past few days but I will spare you. The information probably will trickle out. For instance, did you know that chicks do not need to eat for 3 days after hatching because they suck the yolk of the egg in through their naval when they hatch?

I'm not really planning anything yet, because after all, there is even a cliche that covers precisely this situation, but I do hope some of the eggs hatch because it would be fun to have chickies and it would reward the poor hen for all her hard work. Oh, who am I kidding, I have the estimated hatch date marked on my calendar and I have a cardboard box set aside to put them in when they hatch so the other hen isn't mean to them.

I finished another knit item (number 5 out of the original 18 unfinished items). This one is a significant one, too! I came across the pattern on Ravelry and fell in love with it and bought it on the spot. Unfortunately, while the PDF looked very nice, the chart printed out in 2 very similar shades of gray. I emailed the designer and her response was something along the lines of "Huh, that's weird." But I loved the pattern so I persisted forward, coloring in the squares in the chart by hand. Then I realized that the yarns I had chosen were too similar in hue and the patterning was invisible. Undaunted, I bought more yarn and started over. Then I realized that if I put the thumb where it was indicated in the pattern, the mitten would be too short to cover my wrist. I still loved the pattern, so I adapted. Then the goddamn dog decided that bamboo knitting needles were delicious and crunchy and pulled them out of the mittens and ate them and they were 2.5 millimeter needles which of course were hard to find locally so I got some 2 mm needles and they totally did not work and so I decided it was high time to give up on this project and I put it away for 2 years. I will admit, picking it back up was pretty daunting, but I did, and I persisted and ta da! I have 2 mittens and nowhere to wear them.



My other project is just a little thing that will be a part of something bigger:



http://www.mrxstitch.com/2012/01/30/newsflash-in-a-war-someone-has-to-die/

I found this handkerchief at a local vintage store and thought its delicacy made it a good fit for this project (the other ones I found were loud and floral, which is delightful, but I thought this called for something a little more subdued. Some of them even came with free vintage boogers included!) It's fine linen, almost transparent, with little delicate flowers embroidered in the corners (it would not actually be very functional as a handkerchief as any hearty blow would go right through it). Initially, I wanted to embroider the words in heavy, dramatic black letters to contrast with the fragility of the hanky, but once I started, I decided instead to go with something more gentle and in-keeping with the original embroidery. No way to say this without sounding pretentious, but I liked thinking that I was collaborating with the original needle-worker.

Here is O's blog post about the project. http://cocoaeyesthestitcher.blogspot.com/2012/03/in-war-someone-has-to-die.html

I haven't been up to much interesting because I have had a yucky cold. But, I have been pretty productive knitting-wise!

I was bad and cast on a new project. But, in my defense, it was a fast project, and I was test knitting it for an internet friend. In a culmination of in-jokes that would make no sense if I tried to explain them, I present myself looking kinda like a ninja swathed in the Saskatoon Green Waffles Hoat-wrap. http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/saskatoon Good thing I finished it too, because it has been cold.



ETA: CHECK OUT MY CUCKOO CLOCK! It is annoying as fuck.

Something I am very proud of is finishing a long-term project. I think I started it last April? That yarn had a hard time deciding what it wanted to be; my mom started making a scarf out of it but it didn't work out, so she gave the yarn to me, then I tried to make a sweater out of it but it just didn't want to be a sweater, and finally it was happy to be a blanket. The pattern is http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/ten-stitch-blanket
and it started off pretty cool but then I got bored with it after a while, but it was a nice thing to take to knitting group because it didn't take much attention, but then it got big and unwieldy. Anyway, it's done now, and it would be a great sofa blanket but the cat claimed it.

Please support an act to provide permanent tax credits so adopting families can recoup at least a portion of their expenses!

You can sign a petition here (although it only supports an extension of the current credits, not a permanent solution):
http://www.change.org/petitions/make-adoption-costs-fully-refundable-in-the-2012-2013-tax-years

And if you live in NC, you can contact Senator Richard Burr, who is one of the sponsors of this bill:
http://burr.senate.gov/public/

Here's the letter I wrote:

Dear sir, I am writing regarding Senate bill 82, Adoption Tax Relief Guarantee act.
My husband and I are currently saving all the money we can because we hope to begin the adoption process later this year. It has been a very difficult path for us dealing with our fertility issues, and we are very excited about starting a family soon. However, I'm a social worker and he's an electrician, and the average cost of adoption is 25-35 thousand dollars -- that's my husband's yearly salary! We are fortunate that we have supportive family who are helping us reach our financial goals. It would be enormously helpful to us if we knew we could get at least a little of that money back. And it would be encouraging to people less well-off than us and open the possibility of adoption to them. Additionally, NC has the 16th-highest number of children in foster care in the country, with well over 10,000 children without permanent homes. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was an additional incentive for families to provide permanent, loving homes to these children?
Thank you for your consideration,
Katherine Ruiz