Apples, Tieflings, and Navy Showers
A couple of weekends ago I tried to organize an apple-picking trip. As most things that I attempt to organize which require the attendance of friends, it didn't really attract much in the way of people (just Alex, Nataliya, Max, & Becca), and naturally, it kind of went awry anyway.
After a tasty brunch in Berkeley, a city I clearly need to explore more, we continued driving up to Petaluma and the Chileno Valley Ranch. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they had concluded that this needed to be the very last day of their U-Pick Apples for the season, because the drought had caused such a lousy harvest, and what was left was under attack by thirsty/hungry yellow-jackets. I have a couple of pounds of crab-apple-sized apples that, had this not been a drought, would surely be lovely full-sized specimens of interesting varieties of apples. It was a somewhat depressing experience, seeing how sad the apples were, and then hearing how the farm has had to sell over a quarter of their livestock because they can't afford to feed and water them, as the drought means no natural grass growing that the animals can eat, so they have to pay for hay to be shipped in. I did, however, get one cool thing there, and that's some actual quinces. I've never seen them in the flesh before! Naturally, I did an idiotic thing and didn't notice that one of them had a giant cleft in it and the fruit around that cleft is going to have to be cut away before I can make any jam or anything with them, but that is my plan. I want to try and make two micro-batches, since I don't have many (they had ONE quince tree), one with honey and one without (so Mom can have some). It'll take a little research to make sure I do it right, since I won't really have second chances with them.
So far I've managed to make apple muffins, but I ran out of cinnamon half-way through, and since I only ever do things at midnight, the muffins themselves don't have enough cinnamon in 'em. (But the topping works, there's just a whole lot more of it than I bargained for, or I don't know how to load muffins with sufficient crumb topping). I've ordered myself some Korintje cinnamon online, so the apples are just going to have to wait until I have the appropriate spices to bake them with. (They're mostly baking apples, and so small it almost doesn't make sense to try and eat them out of hand...)
Oh, and on the way back, we also got vegan cinnamon buns from Cinnaholic in Berkeley :D I don't think I've had such a great cinnamon bun in my life ♥ I really want to go back for more! And I hope they have the mini buns next time so I can try more flavors without feeling guilty about it ^^;; Yum...
Both on the way there and back I carpooled with Max & Becca, and I'd been talking to Max earlier (when he, Becca, and I had gone to see The Giver, which no, I've never read) about possibly trying to run a little mini D&D campaign. Nothing that was meant to get epic and long, but sort of a... simple trial run. Since I want to try my hand at DMing, and Becca's never played and actually knows pretty much nothing about it. Turns out he'd gone out and bought the 5th Edition Player's Handbook, and wanted to know if I'd consider giving 5th Edition a spin? Well, all my books are a mishmash of 3.0 and 3.5, but I can probably find some summaries of the main differences between the editions. I thumbed through parts of the Handbook (which he'd brought, of course) on the drive and chatted with the two of them--I'm intensely curious to see what kind of character Becca will build, as someone rather far removed from geekery in general :3
One thing that caught my eye is that this handbook outright mentions Tieflings and Dragonborn as playable races right off the bat. Hmn. Paired with the recollection of a mention of a Tiefling firefighter idea from the WereGeek comic, this got some gears turning. Basically, I now have what I guess will be an NPC character and her nebulous-right-now-but-slowly-taking-shape comrades and setting, except it's going to be a city in that stupid little D&D world I'm of-and-on-again building. She's a tiefling named Yvada Jacobsen (Yve for short), and she's the Chief of the Fire Brigade of the City-State of Terkat. I scribbled up a picture of her in her leathern fire brigade uniform in one of my notebooks at work. (No, I shouldn't be taking the time to doodle, but I'm half asleep most days and it helps keep me awake sometimes.) I'll probably write up more about her where I'll remember to go looking for it, so probably in the old D&D community journal thing. (Wow, I guess the last time I actually posted anything new there was in 2011... sad.) Who knows, maybe something will actually come of this. Or not. I don't know.
Anyway, in the meantime I've been trying to teach myself to take "Navy showers." I think it was some radio show that mentioned them when my Dad was visiting, and he, having actually served on a carrier that went overseas several times, was able to elaborate for me. Carriers are these giant floating cities, and when they get low on water, one of the water-saving measures is to use less in the showers; this means you wet yourself down, turn the water off, soap up and scrub down, then turn the water back on just to rinse yourself off. Apparently, they call normal showers, where you've got the water on the whole time and perhaps may even luxuriate in it a bit, "Hollywood showers," which for some reason really amuses me. (And always brings to mind the scene from Psycho, oddly enough for my sense of mirth.) I'm seeing how bad the drought is, but I don't want my plants to die, so I figure this is one way I can cut back on my water usage without things getting too ugly/unsanitary. (I should really be trying to use the old toilet water conservation technique of "if it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down," but the flushing habit thus far is too well ingrained in me and I basically keep forgetting NOT to. It's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you're in a drought and you don't have a low water usage toilet... And I'm pretty sure mine isn't. So I guess it kind of is.)
Last weekend I went Go-Karting with Eva, Kathryn, their respective significant others, and Oscar, a friend of Eva & Kathryn's whose been along on several of these outings where we've all hung out together. There are times when I'm glad Eva's dating a tall white guy, or I'd really stick out in this group (both as the tallest and the whitest). Anyway, we had a Groupon that made it a decent deal and did two races--I got the distinction of the fastest girl in the group, but I suspect Kathryn and Eva were maybe purposefully not being particularly competitive with this.
After that, we had lunch and bubble tea in Burlingame and then went to see The Maze Runner in San Mateo, which is where Eva lives. Not a bad movie, but I was frustrated with a lot of parts--I think I may be a survival story nut at this point, and there wasn't enough survival stuff going on. I mean, not to say they were dying left and right or something, but, you know, not enough neat things they were doing in their homesteading efforts and such. (Maybe this is why I dislike The Walking Dead TV show, but love the comic and like the game when I'm not busy feeling guilty about letting people die.) And there were a lot of inexplicable things that will probably be spoilers if I complain about them. Apparently it's based on a book, which perhaps will be added to the list of things I could read if I found the time. Actually, I have a library card with the library that FINALLY, after a year of politics and argument over the actual building of the thing, opened in August of this year. (I think it's been over a year since the thing was built...) Maybe I could start reading more, if I had the time. Not like I don't have tons of books in my house I still haven't read...
Anyway, that's the update for now. I'm attempting to get people to go to the last weekend of the Renaissance Faire with me this weekend, and maybe do another apple picking run but with pumpkin picking, too (for jack-o-lanterns), but so far I don't have a lot of responses, and it's probably going to fall apart, like everything else I try to organize. Maybe I'm a bad organizer in some way that isn't immediately obvious to me :( I miss rock climbing, but I suspect when Kerry gets back from her trip, she'll be too busy anyway. Sigh.
After a tasty brunch in Berkeley, a city I clearly need to explore more, we continued driving up to Petaluma and the Chileno Valley Ranch. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they had concluded that this needed to be the very last day of their U-Pick Apples for the season, because the drought had caused such a lousy harvest, and what was left was under attack by thirsty/hungry yellow-jackets. I have a couple of pounds of crab-apple-sized apples that, had this not been a drought, would surely be lovely full-sized specimens of interesting varieties of apples. It was a somewhat depressing experience, seeing how sad the apples were, and then hearing how the farm has had to sell over a quarter of their livestock because they can't afford to feed and water them, as the drought means no natural grass growing that the animals can eat, so they have to pay for hay to be shipped in. I did, however, get one cool thing there, and that's some actual quinces. I've never seen them in the flesh before! Naturally, I did an idiotic thing and didn't notice that one of them had a giant cleft in it and the fruit around that cleft is going to have to be cut away before I can make any jam or anything with them, but that is my plan. I want to try and make two micro-batches, since I don't have many (they had ONE quince tree), one with honey and one without (so Mom can have some). It'll take a little research to make sure I do it right, since I won't really have second chances with them.
So far I've managed to make apple muffins, but I ran out of cinnamon half-way through, and since I only ever do things at midnight, the muffins themselves don't have enough cinnamon in 'em. (But the topping works, there's just a whole lot more of it than I bargained for, or I don't know how to load muffins with sufficient crumb topping). I've ordered myself some Korintje cinnamon online, so the apples are just going to have to wait until I have the appropriate spices to bake them with. (They're mostly baking apples, and so small it almost doesn't make sense to try and eat them out of hand...)
Oh, and on the way back, we also got vegan cinnamon buns from Cinnaholic in Berkeley :D I don't think I've had such a great cinnamon bun in my life ♥ I really want to go back for more! And I hope they have the mini buns next time so I can try more flavors without feeling guilty about it ^^;; Yum...
Both on the way there and back I carpooled with Max & Becca, and I'd been talking to Max earlier (when he, Becca, and I had gone to see The Giver, which no, I've never read) about possibly trying to run a little mini D&D campaign. Nothing that was meant to get epic and long, but sort of a... simple trial run. Since I want to try my hand at DMing, and Becca's never played and actually knows pretty much nothing about it. Turns out he'd gone out and bought the 5th Edition Player's Handbook, and wanted to know if I'd consider giving 5th Edition a spin? Well, all my books are a mishmash of 3.0 and 3.5, but I can probably find some summaries of the main differences between the editions. I thumbed through parts of the Handbook (which he'd brought, of course) on the drive and chatted with the two of them--I'm intensely curious to see what kind of character Becca will build, as someone rather far removed from geekery in general :3
One thing that caught my eye is that this handbook outright mentions Tieflings and Dragonborn as playable races right off the bat. Hmn. Paired with the recollection of a mention of a Tiefling firefighter idea from the WereGeek comic, this got some gears turning. Basically, I now have what I guess will be an NPC character and her nebulous-right-now-but-slowly-taking-shape comrades and setting, except it's going to be a city in that stupid little D&D world I'm of-and-on-again building. She's a tiefling named Yvada Jacobsen (Yve for short), and she's the Chief of the Fire Brigade of the City-State of Terkat. I scribbled up a picture of her in her leathern fire brigade uniform in one of my notebooks at work. (No, I shouldn't be taking the time to doodle, but I'm half asleep most days and it helps keep me awake sometimes.) I'll probably write up more about her where I'll remember to go looking for it, so probably in the old D&D community journal thing. (Wow, I guess the last time I actually posted anything new there was in 2011... sad.) Who knows, maybe something will actually come of this. Or not. I don't know.
Anyway, in the meantime I've been trying to teach myself to take "Navy showers." I think it was some radio show that mentioned them when my Dad was visiting, and he, having actually served on a carrier that went overseas several times, was able to elaborate for me. Carriers are these giant floating cities, and when they get low on water, one of the water-saving measures is to use less in the showers; this means you wet yourself down, turn the water off, soap up and scrub down, then turn the water back on just to rinse yourself off. Apparently, they call normal showers, where you've got the water on the whole time and perhaps may even luxuriate in it a bit, "Hollywood showers," which for some reason really amuses me. (And always brings to mind the scene from Psycho, oddly enough for my sense of mirth.) I'm seeing how bad the drought is, but I don't want my plants to die, so I figure this is one way I can cut back on my water usage without things getting too ugly/unsanitary. (I should really be trying to use the old toilet water conservation technique of "if it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down," but the flushing habit thus far is too well ingrained in me and I basically keep forgetting NOT to. It's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you're in a drought and you don't have a low water usage toilet... And I'm pretty sure mine isn't. So I guess it kind of is.)
Last weekend I went Go-Karting with Eva, Kathryn, their respective significant others, and Oscar, a friend of Eva & Kathryn's whose been along on several of these outings where we've all hung out together. There are times when I'm glad Eva's dating a tall white guy, or I'd really stick out in this group (both as the tallest and the whitest). Anyway, we had a Groupon that made it a decent deal and did two races--I got the distinction of the fastest girl in the group, but I suspect Kathryn and Eva were maybe purposefully not being particularly competitive with this.
After that, we had lunch and bubble tea in Burlingame and then went to see The Maze Runner in San Mateo, which is where Eva lives. Not a bad movie, but I was frustrated with a lot of parts--I think I may be a survival story nut at this point, and there wasn't enough survival stuff going on. I mean, not to say they were dying left and right or something, but, you know, not enough neat things they were doing in their homesteading efforts and such. (Maybe this is why I dislike The Walking Dead TV show, but love the comic and like the game when I'm not busy feeling guilty about letting people die.) And there were a lot of inexplicable things that will probably be spoilers if I complain about them. Apparently it's based on a book, which perhaps will be added to the list of things I could read if I found the time. Actually, I have a library card with the library that FINALLY, after a year of politics and argument over the actual building of the thing, opened in August of this year. (I think it's been over a year since the thing was built...) Maybe I could start reading more, if I had the time. Not like I don't have tons of books in my house I still haven't read...
Anyway, that's the update for now. I'm attempting to get people to go to the last weekend of the Renaissance Faire with me this weekend, and maybe do another apple picking run but with pumpkin picking, too (for jack-o-lanterns), but so far I don't have a lot of responses, and it's probably going to fall apart, like everything else I try to organize. Maybe I'm a bad organizer in some way that isn't immediately obvious to me :( I miss rock climbing, but I suspect when Kerry gets back from her trip, she'll be too busy anyway. Sigh.