beetiger

I know that there are a bunch of you who began the sign-up process to be Guides for the ChaCha service as part of my team when I mentioned it, but haven't actually done the simulator test. I don't mind at all if you decided not to pursue it, but if you still wanted to do it, I'd recommend taking the simulator test today. They are instituting an "apprentice pay rate" for new Guides starting tomorrow, and of course, it's lower. :P.

We picked up projectmothra's reading glasses today. He plopped down in the middle of the living room to test them out. (The book he is reading is "The Twits" by Roahl Dahl.)

Behold the cute.

projectmothra tries out his new reading glasses

Spent a rather depressing morning visiting and calling various Toyota dealerships to discover that the few used Prii available have higher mileage than I'd like for not much compromise in cost, and that new Prii currently have a 2-10 month wait. Gas prices have really scared people, and it's a damned good car.

More importantly, I discovered that I really have no desire to buy a new car, shinier than my current but really essentially more or less the same thing for my purposes. So I'm going to give in and do the $2000 catalytic converter replacement that the '01 Prius needs, and hopefully be able to drive her a while longer.

She's not pretty anymore -- the antenna's held together with duct tape, one of the side windows has lost its moulding, the GPS and satellite radio are a mess of wires, she's kind of scraped and bumped, and she's got 118,000 miles on her. But I think I'm going to keep her for now.

Spent the long weekend with my best beloveds at Anthrocon. Waved at a lot of people I like for a bit, got to get some hangout time with lovely people I was wanting to get to know better, such as ninjahijinx and tracerj. Didn't get to see enough of a lot of you, but that's mostly because I was disorganized. Only got to a few snippets of actual programming, sang adequately on Rock Band. Didn't buy much of anything, and watched my son tackle-hug fursuiters a lot. Small pile of pictures here.

I took my son to see Wall-E today, on the deal Cablevision has where if they own your connectivity you get to go to free movies on Tuesday. The little guy is sensitive, and started crying when the ending was looking problematic for the hero. Only a promise from the concession guy that he'd seen it and it had a happy ending coerced projectmothra to return.

On the way back from the theater, we stopped by a natural food store that had fresh organic strawberry soup. I've got a longstanding fear of strawberry soup, leftover from a childhood incident in the Catskills involving a fancy dining room, strawberry soup in a juice glass, and fits of vomiting. But Rhys really wanted some, so I got over my revulsion and let him get some. And I ate it too. It was good. It tasted like strawberries. Now I feel lighter in the world somehow.

I've been mostly getting out of the BPAL fandom overall, although I still have a large cabinet of favorites that I wear most days. The thing is, out of the things BPAL seems to be able to do, I've already got bottles that meet most of my moods and styles, so I'm not really that excited to see all the minor variations. Add to the top of that that the company is putting things out at such a high rate that either they've got people who aren't the main nose doing a lot of the development, or that they're pretty much launching first or second drafts of perfumes. On top of that, the main perfumer is pregnant, and it's a rare woman whose sense of smell doesn't change during pregnancy, no matter how good a perfumer she is.

But I did not entirely resist the large Carnivale Diabolique update, and picked up a few imps from a circle. So far, no winners, but here are my (short) reviews.

The Blood Garden: I didn't order this one, but got an near-empty bottle to try with my other stuff. It's very like my beloved Fortunato, except that Fortunato's lovely sherry is replaced with a mix of grape lollipops and the BPAL Blood accord, which smells like fake dragon's blood magical oil. If I ever ran out of Fortunato and could only get this instead, I might manage. Meh.

Stormclouds over the Midway: Wanted: Ozone, opium, and incense. Achieved: A gentleman wearing too much cologne and hairspray. This is the last chance I give the BPAL ozone note. It was pure in the older stuff like Storm Moon and Thunderbird, but nothing later works for me.

Hand of Glory: I can't decide if I like this one. The saltpeter note is too strong and not pleasant, and reminds me of Brimstone, the first BPAL I hated. And there's not as much beeswax as I hoped. The leather and pepper thing might be growing on me, though.

Bezoar: The description promises smooth. The smell itself starts out reminding me of a wintery, non-cinnamon version of the Lion, one of my favorites, but within a minute it starts smelling like the "harvest" section of Yankee Candle and giving me a horrible headache. In the rare "please wash it off now" category.

I've still got a few more in this batch to go, but I'm not encouraged.

So, some of you may remember that I was all psyched up about the launch of Batter Blaster, but couldn't get it locally. So when I found out the Stu Leonard's grocery chain was carrying it, I had to drag the little guy out to Yonkers to get some. (Now granted, it's a grocery store with fresh cider donuts and animatronics and a little display with live farm animals, and my son likes grocery shopping, so it wasn't a huge hardship.)

It's basically organic pancake batter in a whipped cream canister. I'm a bit dubious about one batch of pancake batter using a whole high tech container, but they're at least not using CFCs and the container is supposedly recyclable steel. It's got the usual incorrectly rounded product labeling that small organic vendors often have, which bugs me professionally. (9 servings, makes total of 28 pancakes? I guess that extra one is the one we mess up and toss out when no one is looking before serving.) The ingredient line's relatively clean, though not quite the "eggs, flour, baking soda, salt" level that's best for the organic consumer. It contains wheat, eggs, and soy, but no milk.

The product works pretty well. Shaking's really important, as the batter definitely settles in the can. Much as I kind of wanted a molecular gastronomy-style batter foam to come out of the can, making it possible to make tall cylindrical pancakes, what actually came out was a normal if slightly thinnish batter with good aeration that made a nice, fluffy, completely serviceable fresh pancake. The batter spreads a decent amount before cooking firms it up, which makes for really lovely round pancakes if you like that, and also for great silver dollar size pancakes, nice and even. It's possible to draw a little with the nozzle -- I made a recognizable letter "R" pancake -- but my pancake-over-pancake smiley face method failed. If you want to write your name in pancake you'll need a really big griddle.

Rhys says these pancakes are good and he would ask for them for breakfast.

If you were going to make a batch of pancakes and use this product all at once, it's pretty silly. It's significantly more expensive than making from scratch, even with organic ingredients. But the stuff keeps in the fridge for months, and requires only a rinse of the nozzle so it doesn't clog. If you need to make a pancake or two at a time, for a toddler or a single person who likes a cooked breakfast, it's awesome. For the mess of one extra pan and about 5 minutes of your time more than using the microwave, you have a fresh, hot pancake instead of a reheated frozen one. They're tastier than the frozen organic waffles that I've had, and pancake for pancake, I'm pretty sure less expensive, as I think this can makes about as much as 3 packages of frozen organic pancakes.

I really thought at first that I'd see this as purely a novelty product, and it mostly is one. But it's actually decent tasting, and I think it does have a reason for being beyond "ooh, weird!" I'm getting into a phase where I'm a fan of small-batching right now, and this fits right in with that.

I'm not a big breakfast eater, so I don't know if I'd travel downcounty again to get more, but we'll definitely use the rest of the can, and I'd pick it up if I came across it in my regular shopping. Rumor has it some Costcos are now carrying it in three-packs. I hope the Batter Blaster guys have commercial success with this. It's nice to see a little company actually execute an innovative idea that works.

projectmothra and I have just finished a fine dinner of limeade and The Most Complicated Quiche-Like Thing Ever.

We started with an all-butter, slightly whole-wheat crust (no shortening in the house, and enough whole wheat flour for about 1/4 of the flour volume rather than the 1/2 I'd used from first principles), rolled into a 9 inch cake pan.

We added a rather large amount of a mix of smoked gouda, kefalotiri (made with a mix of ewe and goat milks), and a domestic goat cheese.

We layered artichoke hearts on that, and leftover sweet collard greens with bacon from a local barbeque joint. We chopped up a bunch of leftover shrimp and threw them on there too. We layered on some dill and parsley from the little herb garden on my porch.

We scrambled a duck egg, a brown chicken egg, and a blue chicken egg, and added milk, salt, and pepper. Then we added some creamed spinach and turnip greens that we had made from last night's CSA take. We mixed that all up and poured it on top.

Products from seven different animals in there.

Then we baked it until the crust was lightly browned and the center was firm.

It was completely awesome. I ate about half a slice more than I should have, plus some of the crust from projectmothra's slice, since he didn't like the thicker crust on the edge.

I can never, never, make this again. But I do have leftovers still.

lediva and I went to the opening concert of Cyndi Lauper's True Colors tour in Boston on Saturday night. Wonderful set up of the venue, with a bit of a mini street fair behind the actual concert area, plenty of space to walk around and for people to get up and dance, right by the water, and with a tent-like space that made the concert feel mostly outdoors while still keeping the flash thunderstorms totally out. (And there were no lines at the bathrooms.)

I found the whole thing really inspirational musically, both in terms of the length of the active careers of the two headliners (both Cyndi and the B52s have new albums out, and both of them are damned good, and they're performing with hugely high energy in their mid-late fifties), and just in terms of the political energy that was going on about just getting the queer vote out. One of the opening acts, The Cliks also just really inspired both me and lediva -- hard queer rock with a really tight feel, very alive.

The only downside to the concert is that I found Carson Kressley (from Queer Eye) really annoying as an MC. I guess I'm glad I never watched that show. He just...wasn't on board with the whole diversity thing the memo was about somehow, with his celebrity queer schtick.

Much as it feels kind of trite to have a peak moment at rock concerts, I kind of did. Dancing/trancing to Rock Lobster in my little space and my stripey socks, I had a moment when I was there with lediva but also back at a dance at summer camp, on crutches, dancing with a boy, letting myself down on the ground when the song called for it, knowing I couldn't get back up again alone. I was wearing a shirt with a unicorn on it. I was hoping he would kiss me, later on. He didn't. And I was in my room in college, alone, listening on the stereo, trying to convince myself that anyone would ever love me again. And I was dancing in a wave of color in the center of the universe, where love is the only thing there is. And then I was collapsing in a chair, and I wasn't sure if I could get up again, and lediva's looking at me amused, like I'm a crazy mad thing she's somehow ended up with. And she *did* kiss me.

So, yeah. Catch the tour if you can. The opening acts are varying from place to place, but they gave out an iTunes sampler with a song from each of them and I think any of them would be worth hearing. (And if you get to one of the concerts where Joan Jett will be there, I envy you. :) )

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Sunday afternoon I went to the opening of an art show of my father-in-law's collage work, entitled "Portrait of an Old Man as a Young Artist". He started doing collage about 5 years ago, when he retired from being a professor of Social Work at UConn, and he's produced an oeuvre of work that's both voluminous and impressive. Very proud of him, and inspired as well. Perhaps I've still got something entirely new hiding in my own life, somewhere. I wish I could find it.

There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today about the current wave of cook-through food blogging, where the blogger cooks every recipe of a particular cookbook in succession. I've been thinking of doing one of these for a while. Not sure if the national coverage makes it ridiculous-trendy now, or if it's still the good kind of crazy. In any case, I kind of still want to do it.

If I did, anyone have a great idea of some cookbook you think you'd like to see me do? It probably shouldn't be too classic (ie I want to maybe be the first to cook it through), or too random (I should expect many of the recipes to be pretty good), and it should be mostly a main-dish cookbook (I don't want to make cookies every day for a year). It should contain mostly ingredients I'm likely to be able to get on the East Coast.