Portland Farmers Market, October 2006

Well we know where we’re going
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowing
But we can’t say what we’ve seen
And we’re not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out.
–Talking Heads, Road to Nowhere

So many changes, so much to say, but it’s late and I promised I’d post before midnight.

Also, pssst. A work in progress, over here.

im in ur hous paintin’ ur wallz

So, you’ve probably noticed things have been a little sparce around these parts. Crazy stuff going on, from captors with computer troubles to household disasters to — would you believe — sabotage of the internets?

I kid you not.

And I wasn’t even the saboteur.

But here’s the thing: My captors have a GROOVY NEW PLAN they’re going to announce on Monday and it’s not just about this here blog. I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’s got something do with business plans and tax ID numbers.

Oh, and speaking of this here blog, and um, that there blog?

Well….

My female captor, she is SO indecisive. First day she wants two blogs. The next day, one. Next day, two again. MAKE UP YOUR MIND, HUMAN!

So, this morning, as I was leaving a household contribution on the paper just outside the rim of the catbox (my aim is impeccable), I noticed this nearby notebook, open to a page of female captor scratchings. Ahah! She’s written her bloggy thoughts. Let’s have a look!

Belly Timber – playing with our food everything since 2005.

A blog about food, crafts, DIY, frugality, and random fits of chaos.

Note: Everything is interconnected: food to frugality to sustainability to DIY to craft. It’s all part of a whole (One Blog to Rule them all – mwaahaahaa!); all moving toward the same goal of living well on a low budget and not fucking up the environment in the process.

DIY and crafty things? Oh happy day! More distractions! More time for Meeeee! And, best of all, do you know what crafting means?

That’s right:

YARN.

My life is almost complete.

Hey. Wait a sec. Frugality doesn’t include ditching the canned cat food, does it?

(Check out more Weekend Cat Blogging over at Skeezix’s Scratching Post!)

(or Belly Timber’s new adventures in Portland, a three part introduction)

1. In which we leap off a tall cliff without a safety net.

On the final weekend of July, this past summer, we did something rather extraordinary that I never thought we’d pull off: we catered a wedding.

It was our gift to our dear friends, this wedding feast. We took a weekend away from our island home to shop, and prep, and cook up a storm, and we accomplished it all — wedding feast and rehearsal dinner for 50 people — for just shy of $350 (with, I freely admit, a few key donations from the Belly Timber personal pantry; our friends were on an extremely tight budget and we were determined to wow them with our frugality).

Now, even though we’ve cooked for many of our own parties (and for our own wedding), this was different. Daunting. It’s our friends’ wedding, after all. We can’t screw it up. They’ll never forgive us!

So, to doubly ensure everything would go off without a hitch, I donned my stage manager hat and began making lists. Lists, lists, and more lists. (I love lists.) We were prepared. Frighteningly prepared.

And of course, because nothing ever goes exactly as planned, we ran into tiny glitches here and there: a misplaced corkscrew, a lost container of yogurt, a –

You know what? I can’t think of a third glitch. It went that well.

In fact, I have to say, we loved every minute of it.

And the guests and the wedding party absolutely adored our food.

And when we were all done and we’d nothing left but the cleaning, and everyone was happily gorging themselves on shrimp satay and baba ganoush, we looked at each other and said, Dude. We need to do this again because we kicked some serious culinary butt.

That was the moment. The moment we knew our vague post-island plans had to become much much more than just vague post-island plans. The moment we knew we had to start our own personal chef business.

Oh, sure we’d talked about it before, tossed around ideas, names, researched the local competition, but now we had the confidence to do more than just daydream.

Jump ahead three months.

In the interim, we’ve taken a beating. I’ve written (and The Cat’s written) in brief about dead computers and other internet disasters, and I’ve mentioned — also in brief — a small portion of our house woes. They’ve been immense. So overwhelming at times that we’ve spent days wondering who the sneaky bastard was who slapped "kick me" signs on our backs.

But even so, we are ready. Not financially ready, mind you, but more than ready in spirit. The return to our own house marks a substantial change in our lives. Not just a change from the nomadic existence of the past 22 months, but a deeper transition from treading water to moving forward. In short, we need to leap so that we do not fall.

A while back, on a certain Sugar High Friday, I wrote a little tribute to Chopper. Happy Chopper Day, I called it, his first anniversary of his graduation from culinary school. "The scariest wagers," I said, "are the ones you make on yourself and on your future success." Well, this, after Chopper’s stint in school, is scary wager number two. Can we do it? Can we be our own bosses and make a success of it? Are we completely nuts?

On this past Memorial Day, I wrote about the caregiving experience, about Dad’s cancer and how this blog was born out of a need for release. Now, as we shift into a new phase in our lives, Belly Timber shifts with us, and as our lives expand, so too will the blog expand to encompass the bigger picture: MizD and Chopper leaving limbo and starting from scratch. A disaster zone house, a budget the size of a postage stamp, and a mountain of student loan debt, and still, we leap. It’s that or the daily grind, and lordy are we sick of the daily grind.

So, happily, crazily, we leap.

Tomorrow: part two: In which MizD goes crazy with the crafty thing.

(or Belly Timber’s new adventures in Portland, a three part introduction)

2. In which MizD goes crazy with the crafty thing.

Freshman year of high school, I had an English teacher I couldn’t stand. I’ll call her Ms. Rhubarb. Ms. Rhubarb was new to our school and had her own peculiar way of seeing things. This way included the rather brazen assumption that her Freshman English class was the single most important class of my entire high school career. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t an academic slacker. If anything, I was a nerd. The sort of nerd who cluelessly wore flowered underwear under white pants, and never missed a day of class even if it meant pockets stuffed with Kleenex and cough drops. I did my work for Ms. Rhubarb, but apparently my nerdly efforts weren’t good enough.

"She takes on too many things," she announced at my parent-teacher conference, "Theater and soccer and art classes and all these other extra-curricular activities. She needs to focus."

My math teacher nodded in agreement. At least I assume he did — I haven’t been good at math since sixth grade.

My mom (who’s always appreciated my scattershot attempts at finding life’s purpose) searched for something appropriate to say.

My advisor, who was, thankfully, also my theater teacher and had a rather Gandalfian presence which served him well, rose to my defense. "If she can’t try all these different things now, when can she try them?"

Ms. Rhubarb, who would have been fearful of a follow-up firebolt had she any interest whatsoever in genre fiction, backed down, muttering all the while that one day she would be proven right. My appalling lack of focus would do me in.

And to this day (conveniently ignoring the "now" part of my advisor’s remark) I am still determined to prove her wrong.

Oh, I have a calling. It’s not that I don’t have a calling. It’s simply that my calling is rather…

Okay, I admit it. It’s scattered.

Playwriting, fabric art, painting, film, comics, sculpture, decoupage Easter egg depictions of the complete works of John Norman… Honestly. Do I have to make up my mind?

Now, here’s the thing. For the past twenty months, I’ve been on a crafty starvation diet. Oh, I’ve had my compy and my camera and my sketch pad here and there, but damn, the craving for my old art supplies has been extreme.

And now that I’ve got access to them again at long last…

And now that I need to buckle down and kick some freelancing butt…

Well, the short ending to all this is, yes, I’m working with Chopper to build a personal chef business, but that’s not all: I’m rebuilding my arts and crafts studio and I’m hitting the marketplace. With a vengeance.

Scattered, you say, Ms. Rhubarb? Just watch me.

Next up: Part 3: In which we embark upon the rescue of our wayward house.

Mercy goodness.

Where the heck were we all weekend?

Seems our hosting service experienced what we like to call a “surprise.” SQL databases belly up, mail server down, two days of laborious rebuilding and here we are, at long last, back, and, and…

What’s this?

The last post is from November 2nd?

Aww, crap.

Ahem. Brief announcement: I will be restoring the last three posts shortly, each backdated to their appropriate release into the wild. And with a little luck, or perhaps a large amount of sweat and bacon elbow grease, comments on those posts will reappear as well. Cross fingers.

Have I mentioned yet that this sort of thing has been entirely too common around here of late?

PS: I’m unpacking my sewing supplies…

I know, I know, stuffing the turkey could kill ya. Take it up with the in-laws. We tried.

On this Thanksgiving, we are grateful to be back in our own little house, grateful to be back in the big city, grateful to be around good friends, and — when we have a spare moment to cook — grateful for good food.

But today, most of all, we are grateful to Google Cache because it saved my butt last night getting our posts back up after that server crash!

(This year’s turkey, brined for 48 hours in salt water and maple syrup, barded with bacon, and tented under tin foil. Current thigh temperature, 140F and rising. Stuffing make you nervous? In-laws insist on cooking it the old-fashioned way? Get the temp up to 165F and when you’re done feasting, don’t forget to scoop it all out of the turkey and refrigerate it separately!)

(Now we are three!)

At the waggy tail end of a full day, our pupper celebrates her third birthday with home made doggie biscuits. A pound of chicken liver, an egg, a half cup of corn meal, garlic powder, parsley, and enough flour to make a rollable dough, and here are the happy results:

That’s right. Dogs heart ‘em.

Hey pupper, did you know you’re three years old today? Wait a sec… you did! You even blogged about it over on Dogster!

Uhoh! Now I’ve done it. I’ve given away her secret identity.

There, there. Good pupper.