mrbigsteve

Ratfuck beeyotch department picnic is being catered by Dinosaur this year.

On the first Thursday of war, of course. Fooey.

Cooking this weekend: two failures, one success (for me, anyway). Failure #1: jerky, using the venison jerky recipe from Just Jerky and 2 lbs of beef. Mistake 1: very salty marinade. This is not a recipe that is aided by double dipping. Mistake #2: overdried by 1/2 hour or so. Oh well, I suspect this means I now have the jerky for the cookies.

Mistake #2: granola, according to Laurel's Kitchen circa 1974 or so. WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING???? Jeepers firk ding blast... okay, oats are a fine start. Wheat germ? Sure. Sesame seeds? Okay. Sunflower seeds? Sounds good. The latter two items ground to a meal? That was a mistake. (Of course, toasting the same items in a cast iron skillet that is frequently used to make curry... I suspect you can imagine what curried granola might taste like) But wheat bran? Soy flour? It's Frankie Lappe's uber-protein colon blow! Let's not forget 1/4 cup of brown sugar to sweeten the whole thing, hence nothing else to bind it together and a finished texture not unlike soft sand. Blecch.

Success #1: Granola according to Alton. Woo hoo! Very tasty stuff, maple and toasted-oat flavors mix well with almonds and cashews. Rye flakes made a more than suitable replacement for coconut. Things to change next time: Reconsider dried cherries as fruit. Tasty, but overpowering. Use almond extract instead of vanilla to accentuate existing flavors rather than trying to introduce even *more*. I'm thinking of trying this one again soon, perhaps with dried apricots instead. I think this is one that will be made a few more times between now and Pennsic to have stocks to bring along (good thing Lisa has a new higher capacity vehicle)

Possibility for tonight: granola a la Biker Billy.

Send an email to his shrubness. You can try his expected email at president@whitehouse.gov, but I'll let you know now that it ain't gonna work. No, you have to start here, and even that's dubious at best. Check here for more details.

Prune the shrub. He's blocking the view.

(language in the last line altered to avoid potential issues such as this.)

5 lbs down.

Since last Wednesday, I've managed to drop 5 lbs and thus become less than severely displeased with myself.

w00t!

Would that I could keep up the weight loss at this rate. Okay, I'm fairly sure that part of it was weighing myself at a bad time of day when I started, but I'm willing to bet that 1-2 lbs was fair, honest, and truthful loss of fat. Go me!

I need to sit down with the wellness folks and get an official evaluation as to how I should play with the weight machines. Once I have that down, I figure I can do weight workouts MWF, and double cardios on TR. This is, of course, presuming that I can avoid bollixing the one hip or the other knee. The hip hurts for 3-5 steps when I've been sitting on it for a while, and while the knee doesn't hurt, it definitely feels tight and... mobile in ways I don't remember it being.

As for the food, I've managed to avoid too much splurging, and it's all thanks to the Weight Watchers lessons from eons ago (Eesh. Chickie returns to haunt me. Chickie was my counselor when I did WW way back when. Terribly perky, though thinking about the Patchogue location I went to so many times has now been cruelly morphed thanks to "You people are Fat!" and being able to visualize it all happening right there. Lessons learned? Pull out quantity x of snacky goodness (like a small coffee cup of chex mix) as opposed to keeping the bag out. Yogurt + frozen strawberries = smoothie that can quell most ice cream cravings, and if I fill up on it, I don't need to feel as bad as if I'd downed a pint of B&J's. Using a straw helps.

Anyway, time to go home and see how the bloody mary jerky turned out. I think I've learned though that the author of "Just Jerky" really does know her shit, and I should trust her when it comes to salt levels. Oh well. Now to find the flavor to be put into jerky chip cookies...

Oh yah, quick poll time. Chocolate chip cookies. Soft or crispy?

For the curious to whom this applies (I think that's all of... oh, adelais), Myrkie North info actually arrived last night and all is copacetic on the plot. Same place as last year and no official Concordian encampment, though there seems to be a small subdivision thereof.

Self assessment time.

It has come to my attention, yet again, that I need to make some changes in my life. Big surprise. This is not a matter of someone telling me that they needed to happen, more me gradually coming to realize them.

Get in shape. Weight loss is not my specific goal. Fitness is. My specific goals are twofold:
1) Be at a state where I am comfortable with my ability level. Worded this way based on the fact that I now have *two* friends who have run marathons. I have no desire to do so myself, but it would be nice to know that if I needed to bike 30 miles at a stretch, I could without crippling myself.
2) Get down to a mainstream (i.e. walk into *any* store and be able to fit into) size 40 waist. High fashion tends to go as high as a size 38 waist. Bugger high fashion. I'd like to get the thigh chafing down to a minimum and be able to shop in more mainstream stores if I find myself needing to.

I think these are both reasonable goals. If I were to get picky, I'd say my specific fitness goals are stamina first, speed second.
Financial: Actually doing pretty well. Two cards paid off today (though one of them doesn't really count) leaving me with one to go. If I do well with that, I might even have most of it paid off by mid-September, just in time to order an iBook/iPod combination. I'll order it even sooner if I can get *off my ass* and start ebaying any of the umpteen things I've been meaning to. Then... heaven forbid... I can start saving money for a bigger purchase... like a house. Imagine that. No, I'm not planning on buying a house in Ithaca just yet, but I'd like to be ready whenever I do decide to buy one.

More updates: For those of you who haven't heard (but understand the significance), I am now the seneschal of Myrkfaelinn. This means I get to herd this group of cats. Fortunately they're very well tempered cats for the most part.

I turned 33 on Saturday. It sucked. Timing blew and blew and blew some more, and birthday dinner wound up being Subway because it was too late for me to find anyone to go with to find anything interesting... that and the arena district looked bloody well packed, so I didn't feel like dealing with the hassle. Fortunately, my father remembered this year (though my aunt may or may not have, I have yet to find that out this evening whether she was late or completely oblivious).

Cell phone: this weekend proved to me that I do indeed need to once again possess a cell phone. I'm thinking of picking one up next time I'm on Long Island. There's enough competition down there that I can get a basic plan for half the rate that I was paying up here. Grr.

Origins: It was. The highest points of the con actually had nothing to do with it. After pulling in on Wednesday night, a bunch of us walked off to Germantown and found Claddagh, good Irish pub food. The standard fish and chips order was a *pound* of fish. Our server, Callie, told me that I really wanted the half order. I would have none of this, of course, until Toigo ordered the clam chowder and a half order of the fish and chips which sounded really good. It is in fact wrong for a restaurant that far away from any natural body of water to serve such good chowder. With the chowder, I got quite stuffed with the fish. Good stuff.

High point the second: 28 Days Later. Very cool movie. No spoilers from me, though I will say that I loved the music. Very reminiscent of early 80's Italian zombie movies from the masters like Fulci and Argento. Excellent excellent stuff, very creepy, which is high praise indeed coming from me.

(high point the third, which may or may not be a high point officially since it happened after I left the con was having lunch with a very sweaty devilbunny and her latest Mike, whom I most certainly approve of. Thanks for the lunch, Lara, but I can't say I'm sorry I out-intimidated you on the issue of the wait staff singing Happy Birthday)

Gaming: 4 out of my 5 games occurred (XCrawl GM never showed up) and I now know never to sign up for any RPG based on popular characters unless I know the character inside and out. One off day and everything is buggered. KAMB was fun though, and playing an NPC in Prawn (a LARP played in a swimming pool) was well worth the time. I have got to seek out more games from those folks.
Future Origins: This is where I did a lot of thinking. On the one hand, Origins is drivable for me. Just barely, at 8 hours or so (assuming I slow down to something approaching the posted speed limit), but drivable nonetheless. This means that if I were to arrange a miniatures game of any wow factor whatsoever, I could bring it along. Gen Con, however, has many more dealers, much more minis gaming, more everything. It would require a plane trip, no doubt about it. Perhaps next year. As it is, that weekend this year is Gen Con, Historicon, and Southern Region war practice, as well as being the weekend before Pennsic. The weekend before that is currently my only free weekend until after Pennsic, but I may need to go down to Philly to do a last minute Jo-Mar run on fabrics and help someone move furniture down there.

Okay, I worked long enough on Tuesday that it's time to go home now and do some DDR. It ain't a great workout, but at least it's something.

Okay, yet another DVD worth announcing:

A&E will be releasing Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" on July 29, 2003... but only if you order it directly from them. It will apparently be shipping to the rest of the world one month later. Their price: $39.99.

I think I can wait the month.

To bulletproof or to attempt, that is the question

Meeting with a faculty member in 4 hours. He wanted to see two things done today. I got one of them working yesterday and I have a clue as to how to get the other one done. Question is whether to try the second and make him feel that I'm on track or bulletproof the first so that I don't have to go back to it. Second part will most indubitably not be finished in that time.

I'll give myself until I've had a banana to decide.

I'm being entertained by the sudden swarm of interviews popping up on my friends page. I certainly find it more entertaining than polls like "What color of poop are you" or "What's my favorite organ meat".

Of course, this begs the question of whether to ask to be interviewed, to which I say: no. I've been entertained by some of the questions I've been seeing other people asked, but frankly, if I'm asked something in that context, I'd feel like a hypocrite if I refused to answer some question about which I really had no desire to discuss in public. Doesn't even matter if it's something I'd have no problem discussing in person...

Feh. Gotta get back to the real jobly writing...

Oh yeah, and my spoon is too big.

Blame it on Tristan, Rebecca, Teresa, and Kelly. It's their way of getting back at me for "Billy's Balloon".