So spring has sprung and it's a lovely time to be a chicken with all the spiders sneaking around, baby grasshoppers showing up, snails lurking around the rocks, and piles of little earthworms under the old leaves, besides all the fresh salad spread out for the grazing. (Imagine walking around in your food because there is just so much of it...) Sometimes you get lucky and find a little patch of wild strawberries or tiny little baby snakes as skinny and fun to slurp down as spaghetti! But we live in a scary neighborhood full of big dogs, plus being on the edge of Mirkwood is actually quite dangerous. We've lost several chickens and two ducks in broad daylight within feet of us in the backyard to foxes and hawks (what I'd give for a slo-mo recording from a webcam!), so we don't dare stay out more than 20 minutes at a time. Especially when the woods suddenly get really quiet...
I've got mine trained to come in for special treats. Today it was a can of corn and a piece of bread, yummy!
Still, it's really hard to stop stuffing your face and move along when you're surrounded by paradise after such a long dull boring winter.
Oopsie, T'Pol doesn't seem to be around anywhere. Well, when one goes missing, you get the others put up and then go looking. I went back to where I saw them last before I came in the house and looked for feathers. Nothing.
She could just be out there in a happy bubble gobbling up a motherlode of worms, right? Not the first time I've had to trench into the deeper woods and brave the chiggers, ticks, copperheads, tree spiders (big webs you walk into face first- yeah, Mirkwood), and poison ivy and poison oak. I'd almost rather sacrifice a chicken back to nature than go round another tick disease (I'm aLymie) or wind up on prednisone and extra benadryl. I can handle snakes, but I really hate spiders, and we have some as big as your hand around here.
In woods like these, you keep your eyes peeled for color changes and movement (especially as T'Pol has excellent camo!), and listen for someone kicking leaves around. Chickens have a distinctive kick pattern. Usually you also hear squirrels or rabbits making a racket bounding through the old leaves embedding the forest floor, but at the moment it was so very quiet, I could only imagine a hawk must have stealth bombed my poor chicken and all the critters and birds froze till the coast was clear. That's happened before without the other chickens even noticing. The crunchy sounds you hear are me walking, and I didn't call out because I was listening. Halfway through you can see the other chickens really watching me from the pen.
I finally gave up and went back to the pen, where all the other chickens were still gathered at the pen door wondering what in the world I was doing. I told them it was too bad they couldn't tell me where they saw her last, and suddenly I was all face palm going OH, she's on a nest! (This is where I have to wonder sometimes if animals are much more aware than we think and could probably communicate in visuals telepathically if we just knew how to shut up our minds and let them, because the timing was incredible.) T'Pol isn't the most reliable layer in the world, being a heritage breed (Speckled Sussex), and since it had been so long since we'd gotten an egg from her (she lays the smallest ones, easy to spot), I assumed she'd stopped laying altogether like a Sussex we'd had previously that laid only one month and stopped forever. And sure enough, there she was.
The only experience I have with Speckled Sussex are Bean (former flock) and T'Pol (I've otherwise been around chickens all my life), and they both seem to be the most intelligent I've had as far as interspecies interaction goes. Kinda dumb for chicken survival because they're so laid back and the opposite of my flightier hens that you sometimes wish something would pounce on and carry off because they're so aggravating when their nerves go off. But they literally walk around our feet like cats to the point where we nearly stumble over them, and you can see T'Pol was fine with eating out of my hand. She is also my talker, the first one to come get me and complain that she's bored or to tell on someone or ask me what I'm doing or look all around me for snacks. If you are thinking about getting chickens and don't have any experience, toss aSpeckled Sussexinto the mix and make a pet of it. Other people claim their Sussex are pretty good layers, but their average ranges from 180-240 eggs a year, depending on environment, health, and stress levels. I think Bean suffered a shock from jumping right on top of a 6 foot black snake when she flew up to a nest one day, because she stopped laying cold turkey, laid one egg inside out a week later, and then literally went hermaphrodite on us. Her comb suddenly poofed up bigger, her tail feathers got longer and curved more, and then she started trying to crow, so she became truly transgendered. This isn't terribly uncommon in the chicken world, so we found it pretty amusing. Here is the snake.
I'm growing very impatient with the Bring Merlin Back groupie thing. I joined to watch what's going on partly out of morbid curiosity, because I have a sociology degree heavily anchored with anthropology and psychology. I've never observed a live cult group before, although I've seen a few from a distance. And I have to say, this one comes as close as any to weird obsession. I have bets on that if someone instructs them to drink the koolaid, a few of them just might.
In the real world, one fan does not hold the power to make a staff of hundreds of people do his or her bidding. The group leader ~seems~ to understand that millions more dollars would have to be dredged up and a number of lives would have to screech to a halt and go in reverse to get back to an intersect point where they could pick up where they left off. But the group leader also seems to epic fail to see that playing fan politics like this looks like a mental affliction gone wildly awry. To expect the world to behave this way because a very few people (compared to the entire fandom or world audience) 'work hard' to make it happen isn't much different from a toddler throwing a tantrum or a teenager manipulating relationships or an adult refusing to deal with reality.
I'm not wanting to be mean. I love Merlin so much that I spent good money procuring all 5 seasons, plus a calendar and a t-shirt. There are other fans out there spending much more than I have, buying collectible toys and apparel and traveling to film sites and conventions. IF these kinds of things are what keeps a show from ending, then Merlin would never have ended. Its international success exceeded so many expectations, and most of us feel so lucky to have seen it or been a part of it. But c'mon. Investing one's emotional belief system into remolding a television show via a fan army of swooning believers isn't how the rest of us want it to go. I do NOT want Merlin back if it means a handful of fans become the boss of everyone who ever created Merlin, and I especially do NOT want those fans to be the boss of Bradley and Colin.
I love the way Merlin ended. I bawled my eyes out, yes. I've seen a lot of Arthurs and Merlins come and go, and this creation was such beautifully crafted story about such a deep friendship, and how that friendship survived through thick and thin and eventually led to the United Kingdoms. We watched a core belief system rebirth through the seasons and in the end came down to a serving girl on a throne because of the utter kindness of her king. THAT is what Albion is all about. Albion is a dream that we are ALL equal, that we ALL matter, and that we treat each other with respect and courtesy, not drawing lines at status. Because Arthur had such good friends, he was a good king.
I do not want obsessive fans to change that. Arthur dies in all the legends, and I think this version of his death is fantastically beautiful and symbolic. Everything in the last two episodes is very symbolic- Merlin stuck in the dark cave while the battle begins in the dark, brother and sister both dying by swords forged in the dragons' breath, an actual dragon being Arthur Pendragon's pall bearer, and much more. I wept not just for the death of Arthur, but for how absolutely beautifully done that entire last stand was executed in film, how wonderfully uplifting the entire series was, how much it has actually helped me in my personal life to believe in good things during rough times.
I thank Bradley and Colin very much for being Arthur and Merlin. But I never want to see them do those roles again any other way. I vehemently do NOT want obsessed fans to change what is in MY head by bullying the market with faked email accounts and spamming. I'm sorry those fans need that to hang onto, and I do understand that sometimes we really do need something concrete when our lives need meaning. I don't want to make anyone feel like I am making fun of them, because I'm not. I have observed and not said anything for a long time. But as an American who has watched this 'international' group execute 'actions' to bring Merlin back before some of us have seen season 5 aired in our country (or even season 3 in some countries), I think they do the rest of us fans the discourtesy of not caring what WE want.
I want Arthur to rest in peace for awhile now. I want to make up my own fantasies about him rising out of Avalon again to join Merlin. I want that sparkling effervescence of 'maybe'. I want to move on and become the sort of person who would also be noble and patient and true like the rest of the supporting characters in Merlin.
I have been part of a number of fandoms, and while I appreciate that fan support can sometimes bring a show back long enough to bring a little closure, I also understand that sometimes a show really is simply over, at least in the real world. In my mind I carry on to my own amusement, as is should be. Stories give us something to occupy our thoughts while we get through mundane or difficult stuff, and stories can even help us with problem solving our own relationships and decision making. To turn a story into a production on demand taints the joy of those creating the story to begin with (after all, it WAS someone else's idea), and neglects the feeling of pride in their accomplishment.
I would invite the fans who demand a different sort of closure to createand publishtheir own stories. Instead of just demanding that everyone else drop whatever they're doing to please them, grow up and put the work into it yourselves. Invest your own money, dedicate your own hours of labor, form your own teams and produce something wonderful for the rest of the world to read or watch. The whole Merlin and Arthur field is wide open, anyone can interpret it any way they want. But don't think you can dare to turn our Colin and Bradley into puppets that you pull the strings on. Not cool. They have so much potential to go on and do so much more, and I want to see them continue to excel in other work. Please accept that they are actors, not dolls, not the real characters, not enamored of themselves as the fans are. They are simply men who get paid to fill roles. And we love them, that's ok.
I rarely cross post my stuff, but this one is going on multiple blogs I have strewn across the ethernet. Those of you wonderful lurkers who stalk all my stuff, sorry for the redundancy, but this feels important. Thank you for your time.
Scott salvaged an old hard drive that crashed on us several years ago, was able to get a few Lexx things I thought were lost forever after I deleted everything. I made these back in 2006, I think, give or take a year. I sized them down to fit here. I originally created them to put onto t-shirts. A couple of lucky fans got t-shirts from me back then. My Lexx Over Vancouver wound up in England somewhere, don't remember the rest.
There has been something going on this week that quite took my breath away when it first showed up in my facebook feed. I've been holding back and watching as the days have unfolded, afraid to watch, and in a minute I'll tell you why.
David Farlandis one of the authors who follows me on twitter and I have him in my author list athttps://twitter.com/PinkyGuerrero/authors-illustrators/members. I have been thinking for a couple of months that I'd like to get hisMillion Dollar Outlines since I'm in the middle of preparing my own material, hopefully to publish later this year unless I flop on my face or something. I have bantered lightly a couple of times with him on his twitter, retweeted a few things because he says cool stuff, etc. I automatically list authors who follow me, but I crossed over and also followed David Farland onhis facebookawhile back because I like him.
So I was stunned when this scrolled through my facebook feed on my droid very early Thursday morning during one of my fairly common insomnia stints. This will click to the post.
We have some experience in my family with head injury, so I held my breath over the next couple days' updates about surgery to remove Ben's skullcap for the swelling and stuff, along with multiple other injuries, but when this picture came through I lost it.
I knew when that picture was posted on Sunday that Ben had squeaked past the most critical part and had been stabilized enough to dare hold onto some hope, but I also knew it was with the question- for what future?
On Tuesday David announcedA Book Bomb for Ben, where everyone with any kind of social media account passes along info on where to buy David's Books to help with the medical bills that are obviously going to overwhelm their family, which was very encouraging, and I started to breathe a little again. They also created a facebook page calledBen Wolverton Recoveryas a central information page for people with questions. On that page is a link toBen's Recovery Fundfor people who would like to help in another way than buying a book. On Wednesday there was a t-shirt fund announced, along with other fundraising events.
Now I'll tell you why I had flashbacks and trouble dealing with this, because I certainly didn't jump on board commenting my support. I've been on the other side, and since I don't have the social skills to deal with the public very well in situations like that, I just couldn't. Here is my niece after she was hit by a car just before Christmas 2011, and it's one of the nicer pictures. I didn't see her the first 24 hours, and didn't take pix of her bandaged up, you can't see the staples in the back of her head. Her whole head was swelled up like a melon, and they did brain scans several times a day at first, and she went through several surgeries on a leg she nearly lost.
I know from her experience that even a slight amount of brain trauma has far reaching consequences, and that the network of family and friends is affected for a very long time after the injury, sometimes the rest of their lives. I also know the stress and strain that comes with hanging around hospitals for endless hours and days, the follow up surgeries and checkups months afterward, the physical and emotional therapy that comes with brain trauma, etc. She still has no memory of the accident.
So because of that, I can imagine a little bit of what it's like for Ben's family. Ben has a VERY long road ahead of him if he makes it out of the hospital, as does David Farland and all their loved ones. This is something they'll be dealing with long after the book bomb is over, long after things go back to 'normal' on facebook. Updates disappear so quickly in social media, I wanted to make something that helps me find it more easily if I want to go back to it and follow Ben's recovery process, and I'm sharing that in case other people would like that, too. This is the latest picture of Ben from Wednesday.
If you are a fan of David Farland's books and would like to send him a message, you can leave comments at the above links, and if you would like to help personally you can also go through the above links to buy his books and donate directly to the recovery fund. Learn more about David Farland atDave Wolverton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaand find him on facebook by clicking the picture below.
I was named honorary "Snarkalec" several weeks ago and temporarily added to one of their member twitter lists after I hacked their logo onto Kai and joined in a live tweet Syfy watch party. Although I'm not an official member, here are a few links that are fun to check out. You can grab this pic with a highlight rollover for cut and paste.
Easter weekend was cool because the weather actually got kind of nice. I can't get over the camera quality in my droid. I might never go back to a regular camera. Spent some time outside with the chickens. We were all relieved to get out.
This was my first video upload onto youtube from my droid.
The groundcover is popping out.
I was able to open windows and my house was filled with the scent of hyacinths blooming. They grow wild around here.
March was a pretty rough month after a really rough winter. I tend not to talk about my stuff while I'm in it, prefer to curl up in solitude, so anyone who actually knows me is probably surprised I managed to stay kinda public through a lupus flare up affecting my nervous system, and even now nearing the end of some pretty rigorous physical therapy. I built my first Lexx fan site in full blown illness and no one ever knew I crawled through my nights practically wearing sunglasses while I worked on my coding. I confess I have a little more trouble nowadays staying that dedicated, so my Lexx film study went on hold. Didn't help that photobucket's new beta flipped my way of mass posting pix upside down.
My chickens had it rough, too! In all the years we've lived here, we've never had a parasite problem with our chickens. Not sure what the crap, but they got a big bad mite infestation in their nests this winter and were eaten alive while the mites chewed their feathers to the nubs around the oil glands above their tails and the vent area where their skin is moister. It looked like we took an electric razor to them and buzzed their bottoms bald. This happened so quickly that it was mind blowing and very surprising. So we got the chicken house and pen all cleaned out and dusted real good, and their poor feathers are trying to grow back. Feathers don't grow continuously like hair does, so we may have to wait till they molt to see if the damage is repairable. Some of them are getting some fluff back, but the pin feathers were just destroyed. How To Protect Your Chickens From Mites - BackYard Chicken This isn't the best video for assessing mites, but you can see what I mean, and this is after treatment and some recovery, so you didn't see how bad it got.
We didn't have a big to do for Easter, but I went ahead and made yummy food. This is glazed ham and candied butternut squash.
Kinda needing to assess where I'm at now since I started this blog back up, kind of surreal being so detached during my not feeling well stuff. My widget box on the left side of the main page (you can't see it on individual post pages) says I've gotten over 7000 clicks just inside the box since I installed it. My sitemeter says I've had 6900 extra views on top of initial main page hits, but it doesn't count redundancy, like people visiting more than once in one day or even week. My Xanga tracker shows me that stuff, though, some of you are pretty dedicated. Actually, Xanga says I've already got over 2000 hits just this week so far, so my site meter numbers must be extremely conservative.
And believe it or not, Lexx fans, this isn't my highest traffic blog. If I combined all my blogs hits it would be pretty impressive.
Does this matter? Not really, but I use it as incentive to keep going and to assess what sorts of things I maybe should be concentrating on. Remember, I'm the one who deleted all the old Lexx stuff in the first place, never told anyone how sick I was, and I assumed when I came back that no one cared and that was all in the past. Apparently a lot of you do care, and the past is swirling all around us into the future. It helps to see those numbers when my days get rough, because it's easy to assume 'no one' reads something if numbers are low (and easier to forget that these things can be read in the future, it doesn't all have to be immediate). Believe it or not, I actually considered shutting down again last week, or at the very least just walking away (it was a fleeting hour in the dark of a very bad night). It's hard work keeping up 5+ blogs and writing for other people on top of it, plus other stuff I'm doing, but you know what? I think that is the key to getting through hard stuff, staying busy. That I have people supporting me with traffic is icing on the cake, and it does help a person feel better. But if I weren't a puny person, I'd be doing all this anyway just because I love blogging, and the numbers wouldn't mean a thing to me. I have 8 years of blogs tucked away in private.
I want to make a couple comments on stuff I've seen recently on twitter regarding numbers.
One woman decided to shut down her paid for blog because readers (apparently to her mind) didn't appreciate that they didn't have to put up with ads, and she wasn't getting the feedback and traffic she was expecting to get in return for what she was paying out. You know what? Blog for YOU. Pay to remove the ads for YOU. I'm talking to all you bloggers. If you don't get traffic and that's what you want to see, dang, pay for the traffic to get it started, start networking. There is no magic. Sometimes you have to work to be seen in the crowd. You might be a boring person, but there are way more boring people than me on twitter and blogs that have more followers than me because they dedicate the time to networking, and I don't think boring has as much to do with it as simply just taking people on your journey with you. Share your world because you want to. It's ridiculous to fuss at your readers for not being better cheerleaders. They have lives and stuff, too.
Then I read a story about a guy who had been on twitter for four years, made over 10,000 tweets, and had less than 20 followers the whole time. He finally decided to shut his twitter account down, had tried everything, like retweeting funny or interesting stuff, couldn't ever seem to get more followers. I think the guy's mistake may have been that he wasn't original. YOU are the only person on the planet that can say the stuff from the point of view that is your head. What do YOU think about things? What makes you laugh and cry? What do you think is cool? And again, share because you want to. If it's only about numbers while you repaste other people's stuff, you lose the game. You have to care about your readers caring about you, not just pull their strings to get reactions. If you don't enjoy entertaining people off the top of your head with your stuff and you think it's too much work, maybe tweeting and blogging isn't your thing. Kind of like people on American Idol who can't carry a tune, sometimes you just have to realize that no matter how much you love something, not everyone else has to appreciate that you love it. Doesn't mean you can't walk around singing at the top of your lungs or tweeting your eyeballs out, just don't take nonresponse as a signal to quit.
Another guy I follow on twitter gets those little weekly or monthly activity reports that show up in his feed for everyone to see. This last week he had 22 retweets, 6 new followers, and 15 mentions. What most of his followers may not realize is that he cross tweets over at least 3 accounts that he owns while pretending to be other people. Then he live tweets a tv show that he rewatches that has been over for a couple of years, but his tweets are random action alerts, rarely snarky, rarely emotionally involved. You know what? People must love it because he has a LOT of followers compared to me. Why? Because he also contributes real content to movie review sites, interacts well with people all over the world, and gets excited about other people's stuff. He's interesting in probably a very different way than he thinks he's interesting. His personna amuses me, I like him, nerd to the max. If something doesn't go right, he just creates another account and keeps working away. You have to admire and respect that kind of dedication.
And still another guy I follow on twitter does almost nothing but build legos. Every day he shares a pic of a new lego thing he constructs with his young son, and dang if he's not talking to people all over the world about legos. I'm not a legos person, but because of the ocassional interesting picture or little story about his kid, I've begun noticing all kinds of really cool lego stuff from conventions and lego obsessed builders. There are some really talented people out there.
Stay busy. Keep blogging or tweeting or whatever it is you do. Do it because you want to. Numbers are nice, and it's a fun game trying to bump them up, but never let numbers tell you what you are doing is dumb or unwanted. It may be that you just aren't being seen by the right audience, or that you haven't figured out how to network yet. Don't limit yourself to one media and reject the rest. This world is too big for that. Also, use your numbers wisely. Stat reports like this one are a great way for me to gauge how well I'm still managing during a sick spell. It's not about traffic as much as it is about my weaker productivity.
Watch your trending, compare it to same time year before, assess yourself and your content, do experiments to see where you can tweak your traffic. NEVER use traffic stats as a one-time only assessment tool to shut down your stuff. Time and traffic are fluid, numbers go up and down, and it might have a lot more to do with weather and the time of year than you think. I've noticed for years that my worst traffic is usually between spring break and Memorial Day.
Ok, back to real life. My commissioned Lexx art t-shirt is supposed to get finished up pretty soon. It's a huge job, two artists are working on it, it's pricey, and I can't wait to be a show off in it.
Also got a nice gift for my coming soon grandbabies from a really sweet actress-entrepreneur in England after I got silly and told her she'd be rewarded for talking to me on twitter with a promo on my silly survey blog. Click this pic if you want to see where they came from.
I'm hoping that my energy level is picking back up for real and that I'll be getting busier on my blogs again soon. If it hadn't been for twitter I think I would have just croaked off in a corner, so thanx to everyone on twitter who tolerated my weird facebook crossposting at one in the morning kind of stuff. Honestly, droid has changed the way I handle life, certainly makes it easier to get through tough nights now. I never want to bother people with middle of the night phone calls, and blogging about stuff only makes it more depressing, but get me rocking twitter on a droid and the night just flies by. There are so many awesome funny and creative people out there, and it's nice to find I'm not alone in the wee hours. And sometimes I get lucky and a someone famous retweets me or follows me back. It's a fun twitter game.
Ok, guys, I'm off to make some cookies. I haven't had a cookie in a long time.
Not intending for my blog to become an update mecca for actor spotting, but I watch the con hashtags and happen to be following Bill Carr, so these things are happening lately. Thought I'd share if there are some hard core Lexx fans out there who'd like to know.
Bill has a twitter account athttps://twitter.com/WilliamJCarr, in case you'd like to follow him. He's got a new project going, I'll paste the tweets here and if you are interested you can ask him directly about it.
Ellen Dubin was recently at MegaCon in Orlando, and Gigi Edgely (Chiana from Farscape) shared a table with her and had some pictures going while the con was live.
(Please bear in mind I have no idea if all of these are the real deal or not, but they seem like it. I'm not much of an actor stalker, I don't follow other people's real lives very well, so I typically don't friend on facebook much. Same goes for other social media.)
I've seen several food shows that demonstrate how to make homemade chicken stock. While chicken stock has been a staple around the world for time out of mind, it's still not the easy breeze a 30 minute TV show can make it seem. I've been doing this for years, and I'd like to fill in a few holes for first timers. This is going to be a lengthy recipe post with 19 pictures, and some think "overkill" while others weep with relief. THIS is how you make a really good old fashioned chicken stock.
Mine starts with a ceramic glazed cast iron stock pot that I ordered from Ginny's ®. (NOT being paid to link that. I just really like this pot.) Best pot ever for super slow simmering. The heat distributes well, and you don't get hot spots like you do with metal pots. If you prefer metal, try to use the thickest heaviest pot you can find so you can control the simmer not running away into a rolling boil on low heat over 2-3 hours.
If this is your first time, the first thing you do is schedule this adventure for a day where you're not stressing against a time crunch. Do NOT plan the next meal around this, it's too much work until you get used to it. People in the old days didn't have technology and hectic lives, or this might never have been invented. I know, nothing like giving you a recipe that is arduous and time consuming, but it's THE BEST chicken stock you ever tasted in your life. All your other recipes using chicken stock will benefit.
I like using Smart Chicken®. It's a little more expensive, but looks and smells almost as fresh as a farm chicken I butchered myself and froze back. Whatever chicken you buy, make sure it fits into the pot comfortably. I've made mini versions of this with a cornish hen in a large saucepan, whatever takes your fancy. If you don't have a whole chicken, use a bunch of chicken pieces with the bones still in, wings and legs are good for this. Part of the flavor comes from the skin, fat, and bones, not just the meat.
Rinse your chicken very thoroughly under lukewarm running water, inspecting it carefully for wax (looks yellow), pinfeathers, giblets and/or neck hidden in the inner cavity, etc. Be careful of broken rib and backbones if you reach inside. (If you do cut yourself on a bone, stop immediately and wash your hands with soap and water and cover the wound before you continue. Getting an infection in your skin from raw meat sucks, and getting your blood all over other people's food is gross.) I like to pull out the stringy goop and cut off the tail and the big wad of excess skin on both sides of the open cavity. After rinsing, place the chicken directly into the pot. Throw away all the extra stuff not going into the pot, and wash your hands and the sink with soap. I wash my hands a second time just to be sure. I grew up on a farm, and we didn't know back then about raw meats and cross contamination. I threw up a LOT. Be smart and save yourself a bad tummy ache later.
After that is all cleaned up, it's time to prep veggies. Use a fresh knife, not the chicken knife. Make it a habit to use different utensils for meats and veggies, even if you know it will all be cooked together. Why? Because, in this instance, you only want half of a large onion and 2-3 stalks of celery. Don't contaminate what you don't use right away with a meat knife. You'll also want a couple of large carrots, peeled and cut in half. I like stuffing carrot and celery inside the chicken. Wash your hands immediately after touching the chicken again. Put the rest of the veggies into the pot.
I use 9 flavoring ingredients in my stock-
1 t. salt
4-5 peppercorns
1-2 bay leaf
1 T each of rosemary, thyme, basil, parsley, and oregano
1/2 t. garlic powder
On TV shows they tie these up into sprigs and/or a little bag. Making chicken stock is a lot like making tea. Steeping the loose leaf herbs slowly with plenty of room for them to circulate and swell brings such a beautiful aroma and flavor that tying it all into a little bag seems like a crime. Doing that doesn't really save you any time or work later, because you still have to strain the stock when you're done anyway, right? May as well go for gold.
When all your ingredients are assembled into the pot, pour water over it all up to 1-2 inches from the top. You want to leave some room in case you walk off and it boils, which I've done on more impatient days. You'll also need splash room, which I'll get to in a minute.
Put the lid on and turn the burner on low. Trust me. If your chicken was already thawed, 3 hours will be about right on low. If it was frozen solid, give it 4-5 hours, but still keep it on low. If you are using chicken pieces instead of a whole chicken, or cooking a cornish hen in a smaller pot, maybe two hours is good. You'll get the hang of it.
About halfway through the cooking time, one to one and a half hours for the big chicken, you'll want to turn it over. It will cook through just fine without turning it over if you leave the lid on, but turning it gives all the meat steeping time in the stock for flavor and juiciness. Some of my biggest messes have happened while I'm turning a hot chicken over in a scalding stock bath, so be careful about burns. If you do get scalded, immediately get ice or at least cold running water onto the burn before it blisters. Your skin will literally cook from that high temp, and you must cool it quickly so it will stop the cooking. Heat denatures protein, breaks the molecular bonds, and the ice or cold water will stop that process. Never ignore a burn, even if it doesn't hurt that bad. It will hurt bad later when your nerves recover from being cooked alive.
Here's a good way to turn a chicken. Use a long handled heavy gauge slotted spoon and a very long fork, one in each hand. Guide the fork into the inner cavity while you brace the chicken with the spoon. When you have the fork inserted well enough to move the chicken, lift slightly (lifting higher creates a bigger splash if the chicken slips), and turn like a spit while you use the spoon to help maneuver it on over. Resist the urge to stand real close to the pot for better leverage or bracing or whatever, that is a mistake and you could wind up having to change your clothes and ice your chest and stomach. (Twenty years of experience...) Once the chicken is turned enough to go on over, use the spoon to ease it on down. Put the lid back on and walk away again.
Your chicken will be cooked through soon after, but it's not 'done' until it easily comes apart when you press the spoon down into the mid back. When you've reached this stage, turn off the burner and let your stock rest with the lid on. You can take the chicken and veggies out now if you want, or you can let them cool a little in the stock. It will all stay hot for a good hour because the heavy pot is so efficient at holding the heat in.
After an hour, you need to go ahead and get the chicken out onto a plate. It'll still be pretty warm, but you can cover it in plastic wrap at this point to hold in the moisture and cool on the counter for half an hour. Never put hot food into the refrigerator. Hot food can shatter glass shelves in the fridge, and can encourage mold growth in foods it touches or sits near, because they'll become less cool being next to something hot and can take too long to cool back down again. Since your chicken just came from a long simmer, it is sterile coming out of the pot and won't spoil while it's cooling down on the counter, but don't leave it out longer than a couple of hours. When it is cool enough to comfortably handle, I put the chicken into a gallon storage bag into the fridge to deal with later.
Strain the veggies out of the stock into a bowl using a slotted spoon, and keep spooning through until you're pretty sure you've gotten the bay leaf and all the stray layers of onion that have floated off. Throw all that away. It might be tempting to think you can use it later somehow, but trust me, it's not worth it. The flavor and nutrition have steeped out of the veggies into the stock, they've done their duty. Throw them away.
Straining stock isn't hard. Some recipes say to strain through cheesecloth, which is expensive and way messier than this needs to be. Unless you are hoping to make a clear consume or broth, you just don't need that extra stress. I use a large mesh strainer with a handle so it will sit over a bowl. I set the bowl in the sink so I don't have to clean up what I spill, and from there it's a matter of tipping the stock pot just right so all the liquid goes through the strainer. Then I carry the strainer to the trash, clap the crap out, and immediately wash it with soap so I don't have to mess with it later. The faster you get that strainer cleaned up, the less you'll hate straining stock. If you leave that strainer sitting around until the chicken fat hardens and the herbs dry, it will be impossible to clean and you'll never make chicken stock from scratch again.
I really like using tupperware for that stock, put a lid right on it and set it into the fridge. You can leave it alone there up to 3 days, but after that you either need to cook with it or freeze it back. Stock spoils faster than just about any food on the planet. If you open it and it has spoiled, you can't salvage it. Throw it out because it will only poison you now, no matter what you do. You can kill germs with heat, but mold is a molecular structure that can survive heat and wreak havoc in your body. (Grain molds can cause brain damage if bread is made from moldy grain. Don't cook mold!!!!)
All the fat in the stock floats to the top, and in the fridge it hardens into a skim on top, which is very easy to remove while it's still cold. Use a spoon to skim it off and throw it away. What's left is technically an aspic and wiggles like Jello. It melts right back into stock as soon as you heat it up, and it's now ready to go into your recipes. You can measure it out by the cup and freeze in ziplock bags. I froze this batch into a quart bag to use in stuffing next Thanksgiving.
The rest of the herbs that got through the strainer all settle at the bottom of the aspic, and will stay there as long as you don't tip the bowl or disturb it as you ladle the stock into bags. When I get down to that stuff, I just pour the dregs down the sink and flush a little water after it. With the fat and other solids removed, this small amount won't cause a clog.
:edit: 5-22-14 Another Xanga migration code integration update wiped all the videos out of my old posts. Fortunately, I had this post backed up. Enjoy.
It's fun to see what goes into how a show is made. This is a collection of youtubes loaded by fans. If you love this kind of stuff and are interested in Lexx once again becoming a viable product, check out The Lexx Revival Project.
Lexx means a lot of things to a lot of people. At first glance it's just another space show that's a little on the raunchy side, but viewers who get caught up enough in Lexx to see more than one season seem to develop much deeper feelings that border on fanaticism. Lexx has its own loyal cosplay fans and collectors, despite the lack of vendor support at conventions and the disappearance of distributor support for several years (thank goodness that last has changed).
Someone on twitter asked me a few months ago which Lexx episode is my favorite, and after a little thought, this is what I wrote back.
After that, I realized I have some pretty deep feelings associated with Lexx that I don't really talk about. I've been called a Lexx super nerd by a number of people and I've never said why I'm so attached to this show. So here it is, the way Lexx found and pushed all my buttons and why I think Lexx is good for the world. I don't like to talk about my 'stuff', and I'm sure I'll come across as a weirdo to some people when I say it. But fans of any show know that the characters and events that happen in a show can become symbolic of personal stuff, and as we displace our emotions into the stories, we unconsciously learn to deal with our own stuff. Stories give us situations to think about, characters give us relationships to relate to. As we become more involved in a show, we become more emotionally invested.
The biggest obvious impact Lexx had on me was near the beginning of season two, during an episode called "Terminal". In this episode there was a terrible accident when Kai was incorrectly awakened and he automatically braced Stanley right through the heart. Kai and Zev got Stan into the cryopod to put him into stasis before he actually died and found doctors to fix him.
I was completely stunned when that brace hit Stanley's heart, and very upset, almost wasn't able to continue with the show. I had been living with a heart condition called superventricular tachycardia since high school until well into my thirties, and by the time I saw this episode, a surgeon had been trying to talk me into surgery for nearly two years already because it was getting worse. My condition was becoming alarming, but I was terrified to have the surgery done since I was told I'd have a one in five chance of dying during surgery. Those are worse odds than Russian Roulette with a six shooter. A 20% chance might not sound like a big deal, but once it's your turn, that becomes 100%.
As ridiculous as it sounds, just making it through that episode changed everything for me. I held my breath every time they showed Stanley wrapped in plastic, and I was so relieved when his heart got fixed and he was fine. But that wasn't the end of the show, not by a long shot. Although it was hilarious seeing 790 pilot Stan's hospital bed with Stan in his underwear, something else terrible was going on. Zev and Kai were taken prisoner for sinister medical experiments, and by the end of the episode Zev gave her life to save Kai and left me curled up bawling my eyes out.
Within days I called my surgeon and set up the surgery. I faced the fact that this could be it and told all my family I love them. When I woke up, still very loopy from the anesthesia, I sang Kai's "I'm Alive" song to my daughter. I never would have done that if I'd been in my right mind, but drugs have a way of helping us express feelings more easily, and it was a very emotional moment for her, not even 20 years old yet, way too young to lose her mom.
There are other things in Lexx that speak to me deeply every time I see them. In Supernova we learn that Zev was raised in a box by holograms and trained for the wife bank. How many women in Earth's history have gone through the humiliation and degradation of never being more than that? Or being sex trafficked into slavery? It still goes on, all over the world. Zev is the unloved child that parents gave away, the love slave who actually escaped and wound up with the key to the most powerful weapon of destruction in two universes. She could have run away with a doctor and become a queen of terror, but she chose love and loyalty to Stan and Kai, the first people who ever treated her with kindness, even if it wasn't perfect. As a person, Zev was pretty clearheaded about reality, where she fit into it, and what she wouldn't tolerate in an amoralistic society. She could be girly and still command respect.
I grew up in an ultra conservative household where girls could never earn the status boys have just for being born boys. I was never given to feel worth my presence in this world no matter how hard I worked, nor forgiven for being born the way I was (I'm ASD). I grew up emotionally neglected and bizarrely treated, so when I saw Zev, it totally clicked. Many girls grow up feeling ugly or like they can't earn the love missing when their parents have their priorities mixed up, and then they feel pushed to perform 'wifely duties' and other behaviors attempting to earn that love. Growing up with a Mennonite father might be the same as growing up in any religiously repressed household where women have a 'place'. What very little we see of what happens to Zev in the first and second movies screams loads about third class citizens under the thumb of His Divine Shadow, and speaks loudly to repressed women watching the show. That so much could be implied in so little film time for her character is overwhelmingly poetic. All the sadness she grew up with, I have felt.
I just got this tweet as I was finishing that sentence.
I'm sitting in a public library bawling because of that. Was managing to hold it in till then. No idea if anyone is looking at me, staying focused on my writing.
Moving on.
It's not real often I run into a show where all the core characters have so much meaning for me. I'm not trying to hog the fan feels, in fact, I've kept all this in for many years. This is the first time in the years since Lexx first aired that I'm talking about this next bit to anyone in context of how it affects me personally.
Everybody loves Kai. The girls, the boys, the robot heads- everybody either wants to love Kai or to be Kai. Kai is just that cool. My initial reaction to Kai was repulsion. I couldn't explain it, still can't. It has nothing to do with sex or looks or that he was a killer or that he's dead. None of that. I think it's his conundrum between being able to intellectually know something and being unable to emotionally feel it. While other fans mooned and anthropomorphized, I just very simply got it. I'm stuck, too. I've had a pretty big challenge most of my life making the leap from processing information to feeling something about it, especially to being aware of having feelings and what to do with them. Michael himself has talked about the mandatory autistic nature of his character in interviews, especially during one scene in season three where Kai tried to bury himself and Xev asked him what he's doing buried in the dirt. I've gone weeks and even months not contacting family and feeling very content just to be left alone. It doesn't mean I don't like people, I actually like people very much. But I suffer an emotional disconnect that I don't see demonstrated very well in fictional characters, and I guess this hit pretty close to home for me. So much of my life I have simply just not reacted to people or events happening around me, and I come across to others as strange, cold, or uncaring, when really everything is going through an intellectual filter first. Much of the reactions I've learned to mimic are contrived for the sake of not being willing to die alone. I've been working very hard on social interaction and communication skills for several years, and I'm getting better and better at it, but in an eyeblink I could just turn into a statue and stare if I weren't self monitoring. I do a lot of thinking during those moments. I've wondered a lot about the reanimated state of Kai's physical brain, how the protoblood affects his actual synaptic processes, the locality of the 'me' point of view still being present either by simple function or by intellectual reaction to self observation. I have a sociology degree and aced classes in social psyche and brain studies, so the whole Kai experience thing really intrigues me. While other fans shipped him into fanfictions, I tore every scrap of that character apart in my mind trying to figure out the meaning behind his being, if there is any, and whether that kind of existence is horrifying. To never be able to turn all your memories off, to know the horrors of your body being severed into pieces and put back together like toys, to live with the idea that your body was raked out and rebuilt with foreign parts- who would want to own that? Would coming back to life somehow bring unbearable pain to all that scar tissue? For the life of me, I could never figure out how in the world people couldn't see that he had to reach through all that maddening static to interact with the others. To keep it all together in a dead brain and still be a 'nice guy' of a sort is a real icon for living with depression, when everyone around you still gets to enjoy food, enjoy sex, enjoy anything. I wonder if that's why so many fans might be subconsciously attracted to Kai, because in spite of his whole world being utterly black, he still finds a way to make a choice (through others) to do the right thing. *wow* He's darker than Batman could ever hope to be.
I love Stanley Tweedle. From the first time I saw him, I recognized the whole rebellious wimp thing as my favorite character type, because you never know what guys like that are going to do, and sometimes they pull through in ways you don't expect in the face of really big crap, and the way they do it may not always be cool, but it becomes cool. Stanley never gave up, even when everything sucked and everyone was against him, and that's what I'm like when everything sucks, I get cranky and rebellious and turn my crap day into something cool, because I want to. I hate depression. I've lived with ridiculous amounts of depression nearly my whole life, and as a way of life I like to twist it into a pretzel and throw it back at the universe. Stanley Tweedle is my all-time favorite scifi character because the twisted irony that swims through spacetime around that guy makes me laugh and want to hug people for all the suckiness they go through, even when I'm feeling crabby. If anyone could finger His Shadow, I'm really glad it was him, because he's like the rest of us, stumbling through our days and stubbornly hoping for the best even if the only way we can get it is to make it up.
And what about the Lexx itself? It all started for me with the big bug on Showtime. I saw the interview promo about a spaceship designed like a bug, a biomechanoid that was genetically designed and then grown to a monstrous size. As a living ship this space bug could carry a city-sized amount of crew and materials and interact in a simple way to a commander who had direct control over it via a 'key'. This key was a bio coded interface program that enabled conversation between bug and captain, and that was the cutest thing I ever saw in a space show. I grew up disgusted with bugs but have come to see them differently since I first encountered Lexx. Now I see them as tiny little bio machines that follow simple genetic codes, with simple feelings and thoughts like Lexx had. I don't know whether that's true, but I think it's better than hating bugs just because they're bugs. Lexx is also terrified of spiders, like I am, but I seem to be dealing with my arachnophobia a little better since my view on bugs has changed.
I could write a whole book on the characters and stories in Lexx, but this is already pretty long, and all that can go into more posts later. One last thought- Lexx has a real Don't Fear the Reaper feel to it, and I guess that's why I love it so much. No matter how awful everything gets, no matter how real and big and dark, the Lexx crew struggle with the real and big and dark and come through intact, themselves, knowing who they are and what they want.
:edit: 5-23-14 Another code integration update during this lengthy Xanga migration to new servers wiped all my videos from my posts, and since I can't remember the one I had here, I'm replacing it with my two fave Zev/Xev vids. You're welcome. Carry on.
I found this saved on my private blog, must have double posted it. I originally had it posted on my old Lexx fan blog, all that stuff is gone now, including the Xenia picture I used, so it's now missing from this post. I can't find it online any more, but it's an almost identical picture. :edit: 6-26-13 You know what, I found that picture at http://www.norajean.com/Biz-Archive/LEXX-Home/LEXX-001a.htm, huzzah!
Thursday, August 31, 2006
I have my own little Xev. She could care less about Lexx and thinks I'm crazy to watch it. She has no idea who Xenia is. Xenia has no idea who she is, either, so they're even. I just ran into that Xenia picture down there.
Ok, this is 2013 again, she's much older now. I wanted to add this to why Lexx is personal for me, because it's important.
'Twink' (my online nickname for her, after she scolded Scott one day about something, saying before she was even a twinkle in his eye), is my step daughter. I met her before she turned two, married her dad a little before before she turned five, and have pretty much been full time parent for her nearly all her life. Any step parent will appreciate how stressful it got at times since we live next door to her gramma and had somewhat regular contact with her mom. I come from a very different lifestyle background and the first five years in this house were challenging. One of the key things I learned was 'child first', and I made it through some tough emotional roller coaster years because I firmly believe in that.
A really eye-opening year was when the third season of Lexx aired. Both Xev and Twink had changed. Twink was just hitting her teens about the time Prince woke Xev up out of the cryopod, and the timing was so perfect for me. When an adolescent not of your own body lives in your house and you feel like the whole world is against you being the parent figure, a marriage can rock completely apart. Ours didn't. In fact, I suddenly felt a renewed compassion for my Twink, thanx to Xev that year. For one thing, Twink suddenly looked like one of my fave science fiction characters, a strong woman of misfortune, beautiful and committed to finding real love in her life. That character represented so many things I admire in strong women, like solid friendship through thick and thin, not being intimidated by what others think, knowing herself and sticking to her guns. I was able to transfer those feelings onto a step child who really needed a break. Life sucks when you first hit your teens, and you don't need other people's emotional baggage dragging you down. Because Xenia played Xev in the third season of Lexx, I was able to love a child through a very difficult year.
I come from people who don't believe in putting ourselves into spotlights for attention, and think striving to be 'pretty' leads to being sinful. I don't agree with this. I think people need to feel pretty in many ways, because feeling pretty means feeling like someone likes and accepts us. 'Pretty' is a metaphor, the opposite of 'ugly'. We feel ugly when we feel unwanted. The prettiest person in the world feels ugly if something is wrong in their emotional life, and there is nothing you can say to convince them otherwise.
My Twink is a very pretty person, especially on the inside, and I'm very proud of her. Be Lexxy with each other.
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My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.
My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.
Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.
In all the years we've lived here, we've never had a parasite problem with our chickens. Not sure what the crap, but they got a big bad mite infestation in their nests this winter and were eaten alive while the mites chewed their feathers to the nubs around the oil glands above their tails and the vent area where their skin is moister. It looked like we took an electric razor to them and buzzed their bottoms bald. This happened so quickly that it was mind blowing and very surprising. So we got the chicken house and pen all cleaned out and dusted real good, and their poor feathers are trying to grow back. Feathers don't grow continuously like hair does, so we may have to wait till they molt to see if the damage is repairable. Some of them are getting some fluff back, but the pin feathers were just destroyed. 
Actually, Xanga says I've already got over 2000 hits just this week so far, so my site meter numbers must be extremely conservative.
If I combined all my blogs hits it would be pretty impressive.
Enjoy.
