Ithaca friends take note: your refugee plants are welcome with me, especially if they happen to be tasty plants! A friend of mine is going away for the summer, and so she left behind her cute little thai basil plant with me. I popped a couple leaves in my leftover pad thai that I heated up for lunch today.

Last year the SO and I tried growing some plants out on our back patio, but we were thwarted at every turn: the back patio is too shady, it rained all the time, and the squirrels! Those merciless little jerks ate everything they found tasty, and dug up the rest just for fun. The SO, normally a nice, calm vegan man, actually threw rocks at the squirrels one day. They were that bad.

This year we've put some pots down on the front porch where the squirrels seemed less inclined to root around, and we tried one of those upside down tomato plant hangers in the backyard. So far so good on both counts, but you never know. So, friends with plants that need babysitting be warned that your plants are not indemnified against squirrel loss!

After slowly but surely turning my custom fitted pants sloper into an actual pants pattern, I sat down tonight to start cutting and sewing. My SO is still away in Germany, so I had the evening and the house to myself to sew. Whee! I tried to really take my time on these pants and go slowly and carefully, making everything as neat and professional as possible. Behold the loveliness of this single welt pocket.


And my fly front zipper, inserted with the Sandra Betzina method (this is an awesome video and makes putting in the zipper much easier than I would have ever imagined). I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but it's looking pretty good, eh? I'm quite proud of how these are turning out so far.

After I put in the zipper, I went to pop these on for a quick try on in the mirror, and was horrified to find that they're HUGE. Like, falling off, inches too big huge. I was seriously not expecting that, since I know that these pants fit me after having tried on several muslins for the research project already. Arg.

I've come to the conclusion that it's probably the linen. I've heard that linen "grows," I just didn't think that it could grow this much. I compared the pants to one piece of the original pattern, and they're probably more than an inch bigger just in one piece!

I'm trying not to be too bummed about this, because I think it is fixable if I can manage to keep myself from getting too discouraged to do the work it will take to rehab them. For starters, I reduced the size of the waistband and used some of my newly acquired twill tape to make sure it doesn't stretch out.

I was planning on putting some twill tape in here anyway, but I decided to put in two rows for good measure. Next I think I'll have to go back and try to take in the pants by a few inches at the sides. That makes me so sad, because I did a really meticulous job on finishing the seams and now I'll just have to slice it off. Such is life, I guess. Hopefully it will all be worth it in the end!

It's been lovely and snowy here the past few days. Normally I'm not one to celebrate snow, but when I'm inside writing anyway, it's kind of nice to feel all cozy and snowed in. We got a really insane amount of snow a few days back, as you can see by the half buried cars on my street!

While it's all white outside, it's all green inside my tank. Boo. What I thought was a bacterial problem has now shown itself to be definitely not a bacterial problem. The tank is now fully, insanely green. Like, I can't see the fish if they're halfway back in the tank green. Big sigh. I guess this is what the WetWebMedia people mean when they tell you that killing off BGA with antibiotics isn't really going to solve the problem.

I'm a bit at a loss for what to do here now. I've still been doing weekly water changes, but do I do more? Less? Fertilize or no? Add a flocculant? Opinions are so mixed on what seems to be the source of the problem. Generally, most people seem to think that when you get a bad algae outbreak, it's because there's an overabundance of one type of nutrient, or a lack of another type that prevents the plants from actually being able to make use of the nutrients properly. I know it's not an excess of nitrate (can you say ZERO nitrate?). It could well be phosphates, but I don't have a kit to test for that. I'm tempted to keep adding fertilizer in case the limiting nutrient is something like iron, but it could be that I'll just be making more algae soup. Another tidbit that I found from the interwebs is that algae don't grow as well in blackwater conditions, so I could try adding some blackwater extract, which would probably be nice for my fish anyway. For the first year of the tank it was probably a little full of tannins from the driftwood, so maybe this kept me from having problems before.

For today, I think I'll just do a water change and be patient. But I'm setting the timer on this one -- if the tank looks this bad by March break, I will 1) do a 50% water change, 2) add flocculant, and possibly 3) add blackwater extract. It sucks majorly not even being able to see my fish.

Did you ever get to buy a new outfit for the first day of school when you were a kid? I loved doing this (along with buying new school supplies in September). I thought I would make myself a back to school dress for this semester, but unfortunately the dress looks like it's not going to make it in time for the bell.

I started working on this pattern, using some plaid fabric that I got from fabric.com:


The plaid doesn't have one inch stripes, but I figured that this wasn't really essential, as long as I took out tucks big enough to reduce the waist area by 50%. After reading up about the pattern on patternreview.com, though, it seemed like a lot of people were having trouble with the waist ending up a bit smaller than planned. Taking out just a little extra to make sure that the white squares are tucked out adds up, and people were suggesting to size up by one or two sizes to make sure that it didn't end up being too snug. I thought I could solve this problem by simply taking out a bit less than half on each tuck, thereby ensuring I'd have a roomier waist. Well, it turns out that the problem is just as annoying in the reverse.

Do I look unhappy here? Yeah, that's because the waist of my dress is now 40 inches, instead of the 34 inches that the pattern promised. I could go back and make each tuck a little deeper, but that sounds so unappealing after carefully sewing each of these 60 tucks or so to make sure that the plaids lined up. I think instead I'm going to just try to reduce the dress at the side seams, which will also make the shoulders a little less droopy (I'm not sure how these ended up so big on me as well. WTF?).

The bigger problem is, of course, that I now have no dress to wear for the first day of school :) What to do, what to do?

Much as I enjoy being a hermit in the winter, even hermits eventually have to leave to get supplies. First up, a trip to the pet store to get some supplies for destroying blue-green algae (BGA). I've been having BGA wars for the better part of a month now and am starting to get really annoyed about it. I've had my share of algae in the tank so far, but surprisingly no BGA, so I was pretty unpleasantly surprised to find a BGA bloom when I put in some new lights in December. Two weeks ago, I did a huge water change and scraped a whole bunch of it out by hand, and last weekend I did a 25% water change and more gunk removal. It's not as bad as it was, but my plants are still getting covered and beginning to look a little worse for wear. So, here are the supplies for my two-pronged attack:
I've decided to give the BGA one more good cleaning, and see if this will help things, and I also bought some clearmax to remove phosphates/nitrates. The nitrates are not particularly high in my tank at the moment (around 10ppm last week when I tested them), so this is probably going to make my plants pretty unhappy, but hopefully it will make the BGA unhappier. If the BGA is still back with force next weekend, then I'm going to consider just nuking it with some antibiotics. My friends over at wet web media advise against this, and I know it's a little risky, but we're getting into last resort territory here. Doesn't this BGA know I have a dissertation to write?

I also popped by Michaels to get some sewing notions, notably some loops for the tie back on the vest that I'm making:The fabric is a really awesome linen with teal and peach threads in it, and I'm going to make it into a vest and pants outfit. I thought I could use a little break from the quilt again and do a quick and easy something that I could wear around, and so I cut the vest out last night. I also wanted to try at least one vest before I draft one for my top secret project, which I will reveal soon! Amazingly, I managed to walk out without purchasing all kinds of stuff that I only kind of need, although I was sorely tempted to get a new Olfa cutting mat. I probably will break down and get one at some point, maybe Joanns has one of those nice 20% off one item coupons out.