They're fun, I guess.

     It feels like the end of a party, I guess.  Not many people are left, but the music's still blaring like it expects them to start dancing again.  Three people are over by the kitchen having an animated discussion that you lost interest in an hour ago.  A couple by the stairs is having an intimate conversation.  Someone's passed out on the couch.  And you're standing by yourself, drunk, in the middle of someone else's living room, with a half-empty beer in your hand.  That moment's realization, that the party's over and it's time for you to go home, that's what it feels like.
     You're too drunk to finish your beer, so you set it down on the coffee table.  You leave quietly out the front door without saying goodbye.
     As you stagger home, you think about the night's events.  At first, you decide, there was a lot to remember: Laughter! Gossip! People! Party!  But as you turn it over in your mind, you find it all getting blurry, quiet, and dim.  "It was just another party," you think.  "Just another reason to get drunk."
     Later, as you're laying in bed waiting for sleep to overtake you, you find yourself feeling sad and can't quite place why.  The party didn't make you feel sad.  In fact, it didn't make you feel much of anything at all.

I don't know if parties ever end like that for you.  For me, they end that way sometimes.
December usually feels like the end of a party.

I'm not sure why I'm blogging this.  I guess sometimes I just want to say things aloud.

The Toilet Bowl Files #1

I got a camera today, and so I'm starting a new little project. I want to show you a picture or two of every dish I make, where 'make' means anything that involves more work than just pulling things out of containers and warming, or otherwise just following directions on the back of the box. I need to learn a little more about writing and a whole lot about photography. This project is sort of a scratch-pad for me. Just pictures of food and a little bit of commentary. It makes me think of a toddler dragging you by the hand into the bathroom, pointing into the toilet bowl, and proudly exclaiming "I made that!"

So here we go, The Toilet Bowl Files.


Macaroni with Tomato Sauce.
Okay, so I've already broken my own rule. I did just take the macaroni and sauce out of containers, heat, and combine. But I did make the tomato sauce, honest! It's just that I made it about a month ago. I was really excited about my new camera, give me a break.

The sauce is only chunky because I don't have a food processor and I'm lazy, but it turned out to work in my favor. The meatless dishes that I made with it (like this one) were much improved by the extra texture. There's a little too much oil in the sauce, and not enough macaroni on the plate, but it was a pretty satisfying dinner. I'll probably follow it up with an apple, later.

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As an aside, could we all, as food bloggers, agree to abandon the word 'toothsome'? I really hate it. I'm not sure why, as I readily concede that it has uses that do not overlap with other words. While it is misused frequently, it's honest use still falls well inside the majority. Still, I hate it. The word just feels bad in my mouth. It just doesn't feel toothsome, and that bothers me a lot. Let's all just pretend - for however briefly we need to - that we all have terrible lisps, and so the word 'toothsome' is impossible to use.

La, la, la

I haven't written in a while.
Recently, I've wanted to write very, very much, but I don't feel like I have a proper forum to voice my thoughts.
I'll be getting a camera this week, and hopefully I can write a little more about food and add some splashes of color to this space.

Here are the albums I've listened to so far today:
The Dirty Three - Ocean Songs
Do Make Say Think - & Yet & Yet
Unwed Sailor - Faithful Anchor
Four Tet - Rounds
Delerium - Karma
Radiohead - Amnesiac
Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk

If you know those albums you can aproximate my mood - or the mood I'm shooting for, anyway. It's been a nice day. A little warm maybe, but nice.

I drank a little bit earlier today, and I'll drink a lot more tonight. I had a couple of good thoughts about drinking. One was about responsibility and the other was about pacing. They weren't related, but just now I can't get them untangled in my head. It's too bad, because while the responsibility one was desposable (too preachy,) the pacing one was kind of cute.

I've been reading a lot. Here's some official things I've read in the last week:

The Sandman #1 - #75
The Man in the High Castle
The Sea Gull
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Me Talk Pretty One Day
The Tao Te Ching (some)
Freakonomics (about half way)

There's also been a lot of internet reading every day, of course.

Earlier today I finished Me Talk Pretty while drinking, read some of the Tao Te Ching while sobering, and started in on Freakonomics while attempting, unsuccessfully, to take a nap. I'm in a mood where I need to be reading almost constantly. Freakonomics will likely take me through my hangover tomorrow, but then I've run out of things I really want to read. I'm taking suggestions. My local library is stocked OK, but not great.

I'm sorry that this post is sort of boring. I just needed to hear my voice, so to speak.

Planar Chaos Online Release

I just finished my first-ever magic online 'premium' event. Specifically, I played in a sealed tournament as part of the Planar Chaos online release. These ones run a little different, as you get six packs instead of the usual five (actually, a tournament pack and 3 boosters.) I like using six packs a little better. With only five, I have trouble fitting into two colors. With three colors, I often have mana issues. Anyway, let's jump right into this. Here's my pool:

Planar Chaos Release Pool

White	Blue	Black
Gaze of Justice Saltblast Dawn Charm Momentary Blink Celestial Dawn (foil) Consecrate Land Griffin Guide Spirit Link Amrou Scout Aven Riftwatcher Chronosavant Forisyian Interceptor Ghost Tactician x2 Mangara of Corondor Poultice Sliver Sinew Sliver x2 Voidstone Gargoyl Watcher Sliver Zealot il-Vec	Wistful Thinking Dismal Failure Snapback Frozen AEther Ophidian Eye Reality Acid x2 Brine Elemental Crookclaw Transmuter Dreamscape Artist Gossamer Phantasm Primal Plasma Riftwing Cloudskate Screeching Sliver Slipstream Serpent Sychronous Sliver Veiling Oddity	Damnation Cradle to the Grave Dash Hopes Enslave Blightspeaker Bog Serpent Brain Gorgers Cyclopean Giant Deadly Grub Nightshade Assassin Shadow Guildmage Skulking Knight Spitting Sliver Tresspasser il-Vec Urborg Syphon-Mage
Red	Green	Other
Grapeshot Plunder Volcanic Awakening Ancient Gruge Fury Charm Undying Rage Blood Knight Flowstone Channeler Goblin Skycutter Hammerheim Deadeye Keldon Marauders Simian Spirit Guide Skirk Shaman Stingscouger Torchling Dead//Gone	Evolution Charm Strength in Numbers Thrill of the Hunt Seal of Primordium Citanul Woodreaders Essence Warden Giant Dustwasp Greenseeker Herd Gnarr Primal Forcemage Psychotrope Thallid Reflex Sliver Savage Thallid Scarwood Treefolk Sophic Centaur Timbermare	Chronatog Brass Gnat x2 Calciform Pools Gemstoen Caverns

Deck

Saltblast Dawn Charm Momentary Blink Griffin Guide Spirit Link Aven Riftwatcher

Chronosavant Mangara of Corondor Poultice Sliver Sinew Sliver x2 Watcher Sliver Snapback Frozen AEther

RealityAcidX2 Brine Elemental Dream Stalker Riftwing Cloudskate Screeching Sliver

Slipstream Serpent Synchronous Sliver Veiling Oddity Calciform Pools Island x8 Plains x8

Please excuse my tables, I was in a rush.

I was pretty happy with my white, but rather disappointed that my black sucked so bad that I couldn't play damnation. From the three remaining colors, picking a second was a tossup. I went with blue based on it's sliver support and wealth of options (in the form of morphs, unsummons, etc.) Green has some nice mana fixing and card advantage, but precious little fat. Red has some fun tricks and bombs, but I wasn't sensing much synergy. I may have splashed red, but as I mentioned, getting the mana right across three colors is hard for me (esp. when none of those colors is green.)

If I had to build the deck all over again, I'd only change a handful of cards, but these swaps were powerful enough that I found myself doing them in every match. First out are the Reality Acids. I tried to support them with Dream Stalker and Riftwing Cloudskate - which did work to some extent, but they're still too slow, and there are better choices in my pool. With the suspend mechanic so hot in limited, Voidstone Gargoyle should've definitely main-decked. Flying is always aces in limited, and with all of the bounce in PC, he's just that much better. On the flying tip, I also overlooked Crookclaw Transmuter. I kept him out because there's a lot of ping in the format, but I should know by now that 3 in the air for 4 is a gimmie. The abilities are gravy after that. Next out is an island. I had 3 cards > 4cc that didn't also have an alternate cost (suspend, morph, etc.) 17 was just a little too much. There are a lot of okay choices to put in it's place. Whatever I add would probably end up sideboarded, but I'd be comfortable with Primal Plasma, Dismal Failure, or putting a Reality Acid back in.

Except for the Reality Acids, I liked the deck. I posted a 3-2 record, which I was happy with. I played better in later matches as I got more familiar with my deck and learned which sideboard options to swap. This was extra-gratifying, as people tended to drop out after they could no longer make top 8, so the later matches were arguably against better opponents. My final match actually went over time, and I still won. Some people were a little peeved that they had to wait for us, when neither of us could make top 8 anyway.

To wrap things up, I'll just mention a few more cards that played better or worse than I expected. I got to drop Gemstone Caverns turn 1 in one game only, and it was the stone-cold nuts. I didn't beat anyone else that hard in the whole tourney. Later, of course, I had it in my hand when I desperately needed WW for Mangara; so the card is what it is. I thought Ukitabi Drake would play better than I saw. Maybe I was just imagining perfect draws with it or something, but 2 damage once ain't much, and that echo is a bitch, especially since it uses GG. Sinew Sliver is a reason to play slivers all by itself (sorry, I wasn't around for its original incarnation.) Poultice Sliver on the other hand, spent all of its time sucking someone's left nut. I'm not sure whose it was or where Poultice found it, but it was definitely too busy to coordinate any kind of 2T action, ever. Dream Stalker allowed better plays than I expected, and Frozen AEther also did surprisingly well, curbing some hasty suspended creatures quite nicely. AEther worked well enough that one opponent boarded in Molder just to take care of it.

So there ya have it. A rough shot at my PC release experience. I hope you enjoyed.

Pancake Recipe

I've been wanting to write about my pancakes for a little while now, and since I don't ever think I'll have them perfect, so timing this post with Ze Frank's "Pankegg" recipe seems as good enough.

Here's my current recipe:
Dry:
1 cup flour
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon (optional)*

Wet:
1 egg
2 tbs butter, melted
1 cup milk

Equipment:
Mixing bowl, microwave-safe cup, teflon pan, spatula, fork (or sifter), and spoon.

*Cinnamon is tasty, but not for everyone. Even if it's not your favorite thing, beginners who don't own sifters (much like me) may want to add it to help them see when all the dry ingredients have been reasonably mixed. Also, note that if you do choose to add cinnamon, your pancakes will end up noticeably darker. They should end up a brassy-brown instead of a golden-brown; a lesser metal, maybe, but certainly a tasty pancake!

Method:
FIRST melt the butter. You want as much time for it to cool down as possible. Personally, I should wait longer than I do, but I only cook when I'm hungry - things tend to get rushed. To melt the butter: put it in a glass and into the microwave for about 2 minutes.

In a dry bowl, dump in all of the dry ingredients. If you're a little more affluent than me, you can get a sifter and sift 'em together. I just stir it up with a fork for a bit.

For the first time tonight, I tried this method with mixing wet ingredients. It worked pretty okay.

Poor the milk into the cup with the melted butter. If your milk is cold (and it probably is,) much of the butter will clump back into solids and float to the top. This looks kinda disgusting, but is OK. You can think of those clumps as flavor crystals. Crack an egg into the cup, and mix it all up.

I like to add the wet into the dry in half-steps. I like to think that helps cut down on major lumps, but it probably just helps to keep me occupied during all the necessary stirring. Add half of the wet mixture, and mix in until it's mostly a doughy consistency and you don't see much try flour left. Then add half of what's left of the wet mixture. Stir until it's all an even consistency. It should become fluid in this step, but you'll probably say to yourself "Damn, this'll never become pourable batter with how little fluid I have left!" Then add the rest of the wet mixture. You'll quickly see that it's becoming a fine batter, and that you were wrong to think otherwise (yes, I think these same things every time I make 'em.) The batter should stay just on this side of "soupy," but if you like thinner 'cakes, feel free to add a splash more milk.

You should've been heating up the pan while you were mixing the batter, but if you're like me, then you either forgot or didn't read the recipe far enough ahead. That's okay, it only means that you'll be starving for a couple extra minutes. Grab a cookie.

After the pan is heated to medium heat, poor a glop of your batter no bigger than your spatula into the pan. If you pour out gigantic 'cakes, they can be hard to flip. Note: I don't add fat to the pan because I use teflon pans. I add the butter flavor in the batter, and clean-up is a lot easier when my pan isn't coated in grease.

When you see bubbles appear near the center of your 'cake, it's time to flip. Flip quickly, because the top will still be a little wet. If you get some splash, just scooch the batter back towards your 'cake with the spatula. If the top wasn't wet, you may need to turn up the heat or flip a little sooner. If the pancake solidifies before it's flipped, it'll still taste just fine, but it'll be a little ugly on one side.

After forty seconds (?) or so, take the pancake off and start again. I've never actually timed these things, and the first one is never perfect. You'll be doing it several times, so you should have the hang of the timing before you're done.

Makes 7-8 pancakes, and serves 2. I wrap the second serving up in plastic wrap and throw it in the fridge, to heat up in the oven and eat later in the week.

I wrote a lot of words, but they're really pretty simple to make, and kinda hard to screw up. If you want to experiment with the basic recipe, try getting the butter in there in different ways, or adding more or less baking soda. Of course, you can also experiment by adding blueberries or chocolate chips or whatever you like. I hope you enjoy 'em.

Black Fish

For dinner tonight, I had blackened halibut and some cheese bread. I wish I could've taken a picture for ya, 'cause it was the best looking meal I've had in a long time.

I've never managed to make blackened fish before. Honestly, I don't know how I've managed to screw it up in the past. Here's the recipe I used: Put salt, pepper, cayenne on a fish; heat up some butter in a pan; fry the fish. If you do it right, the fish'll be very spicy and kind of tough on the outside, while staying soft and creamy on the inside.

Lesser preparations are often served with remoulade or a spicy mayonnaise, and they tend to be over-cooked. You need the sauce to compensate when your fish isn't quite so soft. Normally, I like a bit on these typically-bland white fish, but with tonight's halibut being more than an inch thick, over-cooking was not a problem, and it came out perfectly. Which was good, since I don't actually have any mayo on hand, not to mention remoulade.

Six Things

A friend asked me to write six things about myself that most people wouldn’t know. I’m a pretty open person, so it’s taken me a while to think up these things, but here ya go.

1. I kept up a livejournal for about a year, starting just before I moved to Florida. On it, I talked almost entirely about myself and about abstract thoughts I had in my head. Since I’m supposed to write about myself, I guess I'll hearken back to those old days, although I have rather mixed feelings about the dramatic persona I assumed while writing that journal. It allowed me to produce some of the best texts I've ever written, but at the same time it made me frequently depressed or upset, and I was often embarrassed by the emotional immaturity shown in my entries. I eventually deleted the journal for these reasons, but I archived nearly every post first. I could still zip up my history and send it to you, if you'd like. Of course, you can just read this blog if you want something more current.

2. As a related thought: from when I graduated highschool until I left for Florida - a span of about five years - my primary career goal was to become a writer. I kept several paper journals and wrote quite often, if not daily. I eventually abandoned this goal for two reasons: I didn't feel that my writing style was commercially viable, however much I liked it, and I didn't want to become jaded with writing because I loved it so much. Since moving to Michigan, I haven't been writing nearly as often. I've abandoned my writer's persona in order to lead a more sane and happy life, and this led to a lot less emotional drama and hence, a lot less to write about. No big loss, though. It’s still something I enjoy doing from time to time.

3. I've recently been discovering how much of a visual memory I have. This comes as quite a surprise to me, because most of my thoughts are about language and programming, neither of which can be considered exactly ‘visual.’ I also have a very hard time understanding visual arts. I had to study a bit of art history before I could "get" art (paintings, drawings, etc) in any meaningful way, and I'm famously bad at watching movies and TV (unless they're very surreal, they tend to make me uncomfortable.) I'm the ‘trivia guy' among my friends - I'm often found reciting all sorts of obscure and useless facts; I don't really understand how I could store all of this random information in a visual manner.

But the facts remain: I remember maps better than I remember directions, faces better than names. When I begin to create or design, ideas most often appear to me as boxes, with a general aura or feeling about what information they contain. When writing, I set these boxes up in lines, and the auras flow into each other as context and emotion. In programming, the boxes are set into 2D space, and then connect via information flows. The elbow grease comes in when deciding what meat-hook realities that those flows represent - often times, this is a direct analogue to the text I need to create. It's the process of turning pictures into words.

In my studies of writing and literature, I've been most fascinated by connotation. I'm always on the lookout for the most subtle facets of every word I read or use (although I admit that I often can't see connotations as well as other readers might.) They say a picture is worth a thousand words; I guess my search is for a word that will exactly meet the picture in my head and prove that saying wrong.

4. To switch gears a little bit, I’d like to talk about the rice cooker my sister gave me for Christmas. It's changed my fucking life. No one seems to believe me on this point. Perfectly cooked rice with no work is not something to be overlooked.

I keep containers of various rice toppings around, and whenever I'm hungry I just warm up the rice leftover in the cooker, and the topping warms in the microwave. Combine and eat. It's about as simple as a microwave dinner, while being cheaper, healthier and tastier. Every few days, I run out of cooked rice and want some new topping, so I spend about an hour making them both, and then I can sit myself down to a fresh, home-cooked meal. I buy a few ready-made toppings, too. I'm a particular fan of salsa, but beans are also good, of course. My favorite home-cooked topping is a mixed-bag stir fry, using whatever meat I have ready and some frozen vegetables. (I use frozen vegetables because fresh tend to rot before I can use them all, and they tend to be more expensive.) I've also put my leftover barbecue chicken on rice, when I was tired of eating it on bread. I’m always on the lookout for more crap that might taste good on top of rice. Mmmm.

5. If you hadn’t already gathered, I like to cook. I taught myself how when I was 19 or 20, because I was developing a taste for “fine” foods but didn’t have the money to go out and eat all the time. It was a little awkward for me at first, because cooking rarely happened in the house I grew up in. Luckily, two of my friends were teaching themselves how to cook around the same time, so we helped each other out, and continue to share food ideas to this day.

I’m very much a recipe-free cook. Many of my favorite things to make, I learned by reading a bunch of similar recipes or, occasionally, just by reading the ingredient lists on stuff at stores. (That’s how I taught myself to make taco sauce, for instance.) I think that’s the best way to learn cooking, because you learn more about what ingredients you like instead of just what dishes you like. It teaches you how to experiment. Of course, it’s very hard for me to make the same dish twice. I like that, though, because I get bored very easily.

More recently, I’ve been actively using two different recipes. The first one, which I’ve written about here before, is a recipe for Chinese roast pork. I follow that recipe because 1) I’m still very unused to working with Asian flavors, and 2) I’m making enough pork for 10+ meals, so I want to play it safe. Experimentation has the nasty side-effect of occasionally making food inedible. The other recipe is simply for pancakes. This is a recipe I came up with myself, after reading many different recipes. I’m working from a strict version of that invention because I’m experimenting with minor changes in each batch, in an effort to get consistently wonderful pancakes. I’ll write about that in more detail sometime soon.

6. It’s mostly unrelated to my previous points, but I think it’s interesting to know that I grew up in a different household than what’s considered “normal.” I try to tell all of my friends about how I grew up, but sometimes I forget. So if you didn’t know these things about my family now’s your chance to learn!

My parents were nearly forty when I was born. I am my dad’s only child, but I have a half-brother and half-sister through my mom. I never shared a roof with my brother and I only lived with my sister for about two years; they are 19 and 16 years older than me, respectively. My parents got divorced when I was about three years old. Growing up, I primarily lived with my mom, but I visited my dad almost every weekend until I was sixteen or seventeen, and he moved a few hundred miles away.

It might be a “different” upbringing, but it couldn’t have been all that bad if it still produced a person you like, right?

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I think that’s a fair enough six points. I’ve included some current stories and some history, some easily discovered things and some uncomfortably personal ones. It’s been fun, maybe I’ll do it again sometime.