| Okay, this is odd |
[29 May 2012|03:36pm] |
I'm sure I had half a dozen things I wanted to post about, but they have all fallen out of my head. In lieu of those, you may as well have this; it seems to be all I have, and it's good to share.
I dunno. I was really really tired last night, and I slept okay - indeed, I slept through Barry being his usual 5am nuisance - and I didn't want to get out of bed when Karen went off to work, either. But I dragged myself up and footled around in my usual manner, did administrative things, drank coffee, read stuff. Got my shit together, more or less, and headed off to the Palace Cafe downtown, which is my current office-in-exile. Where I drank more coffee and ate a blackberry muffin and edited Pandaemonium on paper until the cafe started filling up for this odd US notion of when lunch should be; and then I headed off to the grocery store and the hardware store to shop for tonight, because I have a grill and I'm damn well going to play with it.
And I bought various things in various places, and headed home for lunch - to find when I got in that it was half-past two already, which is just crazy and I have no idea where that time went. So I worried for a couple of minutes over what I should do for lunch, so that I wouldn't still be feeling well-fed when K came home for dinner - until I realised that it really wasn't a worry at all, because I wasn't in the least hungry and really couldn't be bothered with lunch.
Um. Also, I feel a little, I dunno, dizzy and detached. I may not be entirely well, perhaps? I can haz the first intimation of a con crud...?
Happily, the urge to eat and the urge to cook seem to be entirely separate in me. Today is a first run at the low-and-slow notion of barbecue, coupled with does-hardwood-charcoal-really-make-a-difference? So I started the grill going in a spirit of curiosity, would mesquite hardwood charcoal be as easy as briquettes to light in my chimney? And the answer to that is "oh, yes." Actually, I think it's even easier. Faster, hotter.
So we have a little pile of glowing coals at one end of the grill, and a big lump of marinated pork at the other end, and a long stretch of time ahead, and we'll see what happens.
I may actually go to bed, though. I don't nap willingly, but... Yeah. Might go to bed.
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| Great Ghu, but I'm good |
[28 May 2012|08:31pm] |
So this morning, as noted, Jerry and I built the barbecue.
This afternoon, I seasoned it: a coat of vegetable oil to the interior and a couple of hours' slow burn-in.
This evening? I grilled burgers and sossidges and portobello mushrooms, and we ated them in sesame buns that I baked my own self, to a recipe mildly adapted from Peter Reinhart. As I hadn't made the burgers nor the sossidges, and a mushroom is a mushroom more or less, you will not be surprised that I was most pleased by the buns. Oh, and the serrano chilli that I flung on for the last couple of minutes and munched whole alongside. But everything tasted good (particularly the mushrooms, I thought). There was also a salad of mango and avocado and arugula and cucumber, with a dressing built around our own cilantro and oranges. And then there were grilled bananas and strawberries, where the bananas were a late stand-in for what should have been peaches, but hey.
And yup: it wasn't grand cuisine or marvellous barbecue, but everything worked except the peaches and that's not my fault, so... Yeah. I'm pleased with that. (And Karen liked it, which is actually kind of a definition of "I'm pleased with that.")
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| Big boxes, little boxes... |
[28 May 2012|10:32am] |
So on Friday we did the traditional Memorial Day Weekend thing, and bought a grill. It may have come in the Biggest Box Ever; it had to be lifted down with a crane, and wheeled out on a dolley. And there was no way it was going to fit in the car, no, so we broke it open there and then in the loading bay, and the nice man and me manhandled the contents onto the back seat in a single steely lump.
We brought it home, and our neighbour Jerry helped me carry it (or more accurately, I helped Jerry, tho' he probably didn't need the help) through to the clubhouse in the yard. Where it has sat all weekend, while Karen and I did BayCon and barcon and such. I should probably be writing a con report, because we had serious fun and sat on many panels and had guerrilla readings and met some lovely people, all of which/whom deserve mention.
Instead, today is all about the grill. This morning I opened the steely lump and took out a dozen boxes, separated and counted all the separate parts, and spread them out on the lawn beside the path. Then - bless him! - Jerry came around when he was done with his yard work, and we put it all together between us. I could've done it alone, but that would've taken three times as long and been a little fretful. He's ... very reassuring, is Jerry. And we talked about sports and daughters and other things of which I know much, heh. There may have been male bonding.
And now we have a grill, and I am going to go out there and season it with oil and light charcoal and let it smoke for a couple of hours to get a flavour going. I feel all manly man...
[EtA: the chimney-for-lighting-coals appears to be working! Two scrumpled sheets of newspaper in the bottom, no firelighters and no fuel: all the paper has long since burned away and the coals are pumping smoke out into the afternoon. Yay! Just call me Prometheus...]
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| Change and decay in all about I see |
[25 May 2012|09:40am] |
Some change passes muster, at least in the boys' eyes. We are trying them on a self-service system, full bowls of crunchies all the time. They have eaten ... well, not enormously, but significantly more than usual overnight, and were not at all hungry this morning. Which means they were not making nuisances of themselves at five o'clock, which is a win on Karen's calendar. We'll see how it goes, if the scoffing levels off; if they become little rotund balls of furry blubber, we'll think again.
In other news, I can report that the sun is actually not shining - oh wait, yes it is. There are fluffy white stuffs in the sky, that come and go. I think they should go and go; I have got used to my eternal sunshine, and I want it back. This is Memorial Day Weekend, which is officially the start of summer; I have no interest in cloud.
This is Memorial Day Weekend, which is a weird phrase whichever way you cut it.
This is Memorial Day Weekend, and like a million Americans and one Brit we are hoping to buy a barbecue, or "grill" as they call it over here. I have stood over many a friend's barbecue, but never really had one of my own, so it's not really an art that I have cultivated yet. I intend cultivation. I've bought a book and everything. And of course I want the biggest kick-assest charcoal grill on the street, which of course is stupid, but. What's that you say? Baby steps? Pffft.
Also, clouds. It's getting cloudier. I've just looked at a weather forecast, for the first time in weeks: brr! Temperatures in the 60s and a 20% chance of rain. What's that about? My eternal summer shall not fade. It says so, right here...
What else? I dunno. We're conventioning all weekend, and I feel like a fraud. How can I be a writer, if I don't have a book to write? Also I am wearing my Linux T-shirt, which is outright fraudulent, as I'm writing this in Windows. Neither a novelist nor a geek I be. Every fair from fair sometime declines (and yes, I know I'm not being fair to myself; I never am), but I hadn't expected it yet.
Mostly I just want to cook stuff, really. And read books, and potter in the garden. But I have this edit to work through (very, very slowly, apparently), and accounts to render, and like that.
And, damn. Clouds.
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| Okay, that's it |
[23 May 2012|01:48pm] |
I have had it with today. It has, quite thoroughly, been had.
I was just loading up the dishwasher, and a steak knife plunged - I hate to commit the pathetic fallacy by ascribing purpose to a blade, but I have no notion how this can actually have happened, except by malice aforeplunge - off the counter and point-downward directly into my foot.
Blood occurred and everything.
I may have been muttering under my breath, as I headed for the bathroom to seek neosporin and band-aid. Actually, it may not have been under my breath at all, and not so much of a mutter, come to think. Direct conversation with an immaterial presence, perhaps.
Anyway. No more waiting in for UPS. I am going for a sodding walk, and we will see if at least one company can contrive to leave a box on the right sodding doorstep.
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| Unless the LORD build the house |
[23 May 2012|11:39am] |
Why do I feel like I labour in vain?
I labour in vain for a reason. Art is its own excuse. Stories can exist for themselves alone, and that's okay. Like those people who dig great networks of tunnels under their houses, and no one finds out till they're dead: if they hadn't done it, there wouldn't be all those tunnels, and the world would be a little less. It doesn't matter if no one else ever explores down there; it doesn't matter if officious bodies insist on filling it all in. There will always have been tunnels, new pathways to new places.
Most days, that has always been enough.
Today, not so much.
I should probably go for a walk or something, to evade the issue. Vitamin D and endorphins: always good. But I have an edit to work my way through, and I really need to be getting on with that; and I wanted to be here for Amazon's second run at delivering a package; and, yeah. Labour in vain.
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| Chaz'z Homework (you know you want to do it) |
[23 May 2012|08:29am] |
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Okay, people. I have to do panels at the weekend, for BayCon, and we all know how confident I am in my articulacy, knowledge, memory etc. So help me out here. Particularly, one panel is about alternative lifestyles in SF & fantasy, "from Ethan of Athos to Heinlein's line marriages". So we've got those two covered. What else should I be talking about? (It's very likely that I have actually, y'know, read it. It's just that as soon as someone starts making lists and asking questions, my mind goes sensationally blank. And stays that way. I've been thinking about this for a week...)
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| Ah, yes. Normal service, resumption of. As you were, chaps. |
[22 May 2012|04:13pm] |
Heh: I should like to make it clear that I have never done this before, this hosting a pizza party thing. Indeed, I have never made pizza before. I am ... perhaps ever so slightly nervous about it?
Anyway. I made a sauce, for the spreading on the pizza base, as I understand is traditional. And I had a goal in my head, and I went chop-chop, simmer-simmer, whizz-whizz; and took the lid off the whizzer and tasted with my finger and surprised myself utterly by saying, "Excellent - well done, me!" without the hint of a tone of irony in it. I actually meant it as praise, and I am so not accustomed to hearing that from me.
And then in an excess of delight I tipped the sauce into a pretty white bowl and the blade of the whizzer fell out into it and thus caused the Great Red Spot which in a peculiar time-dilation-reversal effect the planet Jupiter has in fact stolen from me, and then I heard myself say "Oh, excellent. Very well done!" and we were back to business as usual, because the level of weary contempt was just immaculate.
In other news, stripping a chicken with Mac is the greatest fun imaginable. He gets little bits of chicken, and I get to play bop-Mac-on-the-nose-with-a-tossed-bit-of-chicken. Which my eye-hand coordination has never been any good, but it's pretty good at that.
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| Coo. |
[22 May 2012|02:43pm] |
A jumbo just landed at Moffett Field. Which means basically that it passed directly over our garden, very very low and slow. Anyone expecting Obama?
In other news, I'm tired. To the point of being suddenly barely able to function. Most of the last hour, I have just sat and whimpered gently. Which is not so good, when we have guests tonight and I have to prepare. I shall grind on through, but... Yeah. Tired. Did I not sleep last night, or something? (I was better this morning, I finished a short story in a cafe downtown and then shopped for essentials. Basil, mascarpone, spare wine, like that. Chillies. But something in that programme has drained me utterly. *whimpers again*)
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| Calling for a redefinition of the word "good" |
[21 May 2012|08:14pm] |
When you have access - through the heedlessness of one of your people - to the whole damn chicken, and all you take is a single bone that's already been gnawed free of flesh? I call that pretty damn good, and I applaud the boy.
Without quite managing to understand him, mind, because that is one pretty damn good roast chicken. Also the roasted purple cauliflower was good, but none of that remains; neither the roasted fingerlings (I loooove fingerlings, and the way I do them), nor the gravy either. Nomming was.
So I have put the chicken somewhere slightly safer (in the cooling oven, since you ask, the fridge being entirely full of pizza dough and toppings and accumulated other stuffs; I should probably clear out some of it tomorrow, at least enough to make space to put beer in), and I am busily putting the wine somewhere very safe indeed before Karen decides she wants some (hey, I had to open a bottle, for the gravy needed a splash - how else was I to deglaze the pan? - and I did offer her a glass then, but she declined; and I'm not at all sure how many times I can go through to where she's digging mines or slaying orcs or whatever and say "d'you want some wine now...?" without sounding like an alcoholic needy for company to drag down with him, so I think it's better if I just drink it, y'know?).
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| New things! Good and not so good! |
[21 May 2012|06:25pm] |
Good: I have cut a purple cauliflower into florets, and it was just so much fun. And no, I am not being ironical at all. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Also good, but oof: I have made pizza dough to rest in the fridge overnight and be ready for a build-your-own party tomorrow. Never done that before. It is both sticky and stiff; I should probably have worked it for longer, but oof. That was as much as my shoulders were good for, never mind my hands.
Possibly not good at all: I'm not sure yet, but Amazon may have let me down. They say my package was delivered at 9:02 this morning; I say it was not. Certainly I have no package. They also say that occasionally their deliverypersons may bleep a package as "delivered" when what they mean is "loaded onto the van for delivery". I have spent all day believing this, and waiting with ever-decreasing optimism to see if a package manifests. If it doesn't, then urgh and sigh and so forth, and we will begin to unravel the oy-where's-my-stuff? process. Forward to which, you may gather, I am not looking.
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| Hee |
[21 May 2012|04:46pm] |
So there I was at the kitchen table, just me and my edit of Pandaemonium and my beer and Mac and the sunshine; and I was half inclined to take a photo and post it, except that you-all have seen a lot of photos of the cats helping to edit in that non-transparent way they have - and then Mac realised that the sun was moving in that irritating way it has, and he rolled over to get himself back into the fullness of it.
And he rolled himself right off the table.
People, I may have lol'd.
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| C-fret |
[21 May 2012|09:34am] |
So all this year I have been fretting about my lemon tree, because it is only tiny and last year it fruited quite heavily and this year it has done nothing at all: no new growth, no leaves, no blossoms. Many bare and ravaged twiglets. I thought it was curling up its little self and dying on me.
This morning's good news? New leaflets! Yay! Baby steps, but hey. It's only a baby.
It's actually quite remarkable how delighted I am. About the whole garden, actually: I have little tomatolets on my tomato plants, and half the veggies are flowering in a purposeful way, and most of the sugar snap peas and all of the edamame are surviving and putting on growth, and half the boysenberry canes; and the sage and rosemary are conspiring to take over the world, and I have blisteringly hacked back the oregano, and and and. I love my garden.
If all I had to do was grow stuff and cook it, sometimes I think I could be quite happy that way. (Also, I came back from Santa Cruz this weekend with a copy of Silvena Rowe's Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume. This is just the ultimate in gastroporn, and I want to cook everything.)
Except that then I go and dream a dream about writing a YA fantasy, where my girl protagonist has penguins for her familiars. Penguins. Is there no escape? (In my dream, Karen scorned the notion. In fact, when I told her about it this morning, she was all over the idea.) (No. I am not going to write about penguin familiars. No.)
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| Big yellow eye is blinking |
[20 May 2012|06:14pm] |
A dozen years ago, Harry and I drove all the way down to Cornwall from Newcastle, in order not to see the solar eclipse; it was cloud cover all the way, and all we observed was a dimness.
But here I am in California, and I don't even need to leave my garden. There hasn't been a cloud for weeks; the sun is still high enough to make observations easy; I am playing with sheets of paper and pinholes. Something has licked half the sun away already. Anyone seen A'Tuin recently? *glowers suspiciously at turtles*
What the boys will do when their sunshine disappears, I do not know. That also might be fun to observe, but I shall be outside. Am acquiring last-minute tan, just in case it never comes back again.
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| The American way of food |
[19 May 2012|09:47am] |
Really I'm only writing this up so that I can do it again on demand, if demanded.
I made blueberry buttermilk scones for breakfast. How American is that?
British people, look away now; I have no equivalents for you. Ceci n'est pas un recipe.
Put two cups of all-purpose flour in a bowl, and add three tablespoons of granulated sugar; also two heaped teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Grate in almost a full stick of salted frozen butter, sparing only that little bit that otherwise you'd grate your fingers. Mix it up. Add a thing of fresh blueberries.
Beat an egg with half a cup of buttermilk and a dash of vanilla extract. Working quickly and casually, mix that into the dry stuff, then tip it all out and knead it briefly into a rough dough. As soon as it holds together, shape it into a round and cut into wedgie scone-shapes.
Lay them on parchment paper or a Silpat silicon sheet on a baking tray, brush with buttermilk and scatter with sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees for twenty-five minutes or so, until golden brown and yummy.
Let cool a little if you can, before eating.
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| Shattered, like a glass Chaz |
[15 May 2012|02:27pm] |
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Well, damn. I hate it, that I am so stupid sensitive. I was actually having rather a nice day, making progress, getting stuff done. Then I heard that someone's really upset with me, over something I thought they'd appreciate; and now of course the whole day turns to splinters in my hands. And I can't fix things without asking my friends to help, again, the way I always do; and I hate that too, and now I'm kind of wishing for an extinction event, or at least a surgical meteorite strike just for me. I could paint a target on the lawn, if that would help.
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| Dim, ergo Sum |
[13 May 2012|08:26pm] |
Well, I am not a great and instant dimsummer of world renown - but I can make jianjiao (that's guotie to you, potstickers to the world) and daizi jiao (steamed scallop dumplings, O my benighted hearers) and that's a start. K ate most of the jianjiao, which meant I had to eat most of the daizi jiao, oh waily-waily woe is me.
Hee. All Sundays should be like this. Reading and retail opportunities, and quality time in the kitchen: how else? And now there's a bottle of wine, and I shall return to Ethan of Athos until Karen returns to me, and we will subside together into a mulch of marital harmony. (I don't believe I've ever typed "marital" before and meant me. Gosh.)
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| Hunh. And I was having such a good day, too... |
[13 May 2012|05:43pm] |
No, honestly. I was having such a lovely Sunday; I had sat with cats and coffee and fresh orange juice from our own tree, yet; and read Ethan of Athos and my new baking book and my new Asian dumpling book; and made dough and planned dim sum and made lists of shoppings; and then Karen took me to the vasty Chinese grocery store and left me there while she went to the pub next door, and I shopped myself ragged and then went to find her, and found that I could drink a pint of Old Speckled Hen there, so I did that; and then we came home and she left me to mix dumpling doughs while she went to get her hair cut, so I did that; and then she came back, and...
See, the thing is, there has been a bit of a grump around, because I got my BayCon schedule and was on four panels and all our friends got theirs and Karen got nothing. So we thought she didn't have any panels, and we were grumpy on her behalf, and I thought about sending an e-mail to programming to grump about this but I don't want to be that guy, so I didn't; but she's smart, and so she sent them an e-mail this morning, and yup. It was a communication breakdown, she should have had an e-mail, of course she has panels - and she has a reading.
Wait, what?
She has a reading. Which is a fine thing, because she has good stories to read. But. I too have good stories to read. Indeed, I have a plethora. And I? Don't have a reading.
How can I not have a reading?
*grumps*
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| Hey, how grown-up and serious am I? |
[11 May 2012|08:33pm] |
I am reading my new book rather passionately, and don't want to stop.
My new book includes sentences like
Ultimately this [accomplishing the baker's mission] is done by unwinding the complex carbohydrates to release their foundational sugars through mastery of fermentation, and by roasting the proteins to draw forth their nutlike flavors, while fully gelatinizing the starches so that they do not mask any of the flavor.**
This is the kind of sentence that normally I would just skip over as I hunted for the good bit, but - yeah. This is about bread. I want to make my bread better. I am reading the hell out of this book*.
*Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, since you ask.
**And yes, I did have to go back and edit out my English spellings. Since you ask.
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desperance's journal
