Or spoken: dElIcIoUs

“Oh my poor laptop….it’s so hot.”
“Of course, it’s been baking in the sun for an hour and a half.”
“I’m a bad laptop person….but then I’m a bad person in general.”
“Oh my gosh.”

“I need a kitten.”
“No you don’t.”
“I need five kittens.”
“No you do not.”

“Close the gate when you go out, my son’s just got a new solar system installed….Twenty thousand dollars, the last thing we need is the bulls making love to it.”

“I wonder if we can, like, drift over towards the ostriches.”
“We do not need to drift over towards the ostriches. They are big enough from right here.”

“Bye moo-moos! Oh dey so cute!”
“They’re not that cute.”
“They are God’s creatures! And they taste delicious, by the way.”

“We got Starlink internet set up at the barn–”
“I didn’t know it was available in this area.”
“Oh, it’s not.”

Overheard: NiNjAa

“Hey, how’s your day going?”
“A lot better now actually after I scared this guy and he said I was like a ninja…”

“This case went through years of litigation and settled for–that much.”
“…WOOOOAHHH.”

“So I learned the sexy new term, and it’s ‘tactical retreat.’ It’s not running away with your tail tucked, it’s ‘tactical retreat.‘”

“–and somehow I’m ordering a box of hay off the Internet for like fifty dollars–”

“She’d pick that damn thing up and be like, ‘oh lookit the snake, isn’t it cute,’ and I’d be like ‘you’re sick.‘”

“I don’t know what a bearded dragon is, is it gonna burn my face when it breathes fire?”

wanton and malicious commission of cookery

So I found myself in possession of slightly more energy than brainpower the other day and also needed something for potluck, preferably something that would dispose of some of the food-adjacent items I bought while high on nyquil that are still in my fridge. Here is the bread pudding recipe resulting, and it apparently tasted pretty good, because I managed to bring none of it back home.

Ingredients:

– 4 eggs

– About half a can of condensed milk

– Some sugar, IDK, about a cup? I wasn’t paying much attention at this point.

– Half a loaf of bread torn into chunks

– Some spices, but you can skip this because:

– 2 cups of sugar

– 1/4-1/2 tsp of xanthan gum, probably don’t use a plastic fork to lift it out of the bag.

– Lemonade

Directions:

– Do about ten seconds of research for “bread pudding.” Reject all recipes as unimaginative and involving ingredients not in your kitchen.

– Preheat the oven. Mine turns on to 375* with the press of one button, so 375* it is. (Fahrenheit.)

– Beat the eggs, milk, and some sugar together in a bowl.

– Tear or cut up the bread into small chunks and douse them thoroughly in the egg/milk/sugar mixture.

– Pour into a baking dish.

– That really looks a little bland, surely we could do something involving that one recipe that said something about lemon sauce…

– Investigate fridge.

– 2 cups of sugar and the xanthan gum into the medium-sized pot and place on heat, stirring for a minute or two with said fork until the gum powder is distributed.

– Pour whatever looks like the right amount of lemonade into the pot and stir frequently, or in between tearing up chunks of bread because you don’t own a knife that will cut bread.

– Crank up the heat after a while since it seems like nothing is happening (continue stirring, though).

– When it looks nice and syrupy take it off the heat, add it to the pudding mix in the baking dish, and place in oven.

– Give it about….15-25 minutes, remove, and cool overnight, making sure to maintain proper aseptic technique when surreptitiously sampling the corners.

Still not sure what to do with the rest of the lemonade though.

or spoken: A discussion (repost)

“Where are you going to get the tobacco leaves?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, where did you get them last time?”
“We, uh, got them from an old guy down the holler’ named Tex.”
“That explains a lot.”

“B, you’ve worked with spiders before?”
“I have done spider sprint speed trials.”
“…why?”
“Not sure why. I can tell you how. You get a PVC half-pipe, and you put your spider in it, and you take a dowel rod, and you go poke-poke-poke-poke.”

“Remember, you are allowed to observe your cat, not experiment on it.”
“Yeah, I can turn her loose and watch her. My sample size is one!”

“Are we allowed to have tobacco on campus?”
“We aren’t going to be smoking it.”
“Yeah, we won’t inhale.”

Unexpected Haul

–The Book of the City of Ladies – Christine de Pizan (!!)

– My Side of the Mountain – Jean Craighead George

– The Yellow Hoard – Kenneth Robeson (a.k.a. the same publishing company that released The Shadow and Doc Savage, and who workshopped the character with those respective authors.)

– The Ringed Castle  & Checkmate – Dorothy Dunnett (!!!!)

And plus three pairs of jeans that was 12$.

Or spoken: Attitude

“Three chihuahuas and a teenager, you must have a lot of attitude going on in that house.”

“It looked like the typical Mennonite, Amish place, with the traditional house and the severe overgrazing–”

“I’d drink from the hose but I know where it’s been.”

“She said, ‘don’t let me catch you selling to anyone.’ And I just said, ‘well, you won’t catch me….'”
“Yeah, okay, Charlene.”

“And I’m like, my dude, I know that the printer isn’t supposed to print wirelessly, I just want it to continue doing so.”*
* It isn’t.

Or spoken: a deux

“L and G moved in together. It turns out they had a relationship that was….”
“–a psychotic folie a deux?”
“Yes, precisely.”

“And like all vets, he writes like he’s an axe murderer.”

“Have you seen John Wick 4?”
“Uh-uh.”
“It’s pretty good. If you like shooting people and techno music. And people shooting people to techno music.”

Read/Watchlist + Music x Monday

Music:

Readlist:

• The Aeronaut’s Windlass, Jim Butcher – I like this book and am excited for the sequel. (Psst, the figure on the front cover isn’t Captain Grimm,  it’s XO Creedy.)
• Some Federation of the Hub stories–Legacy, and The Searcher–by James H. Schmitz. (Legacy is available as a free audiobook from Librivox, BTW.) Really good stuff from the golden age of science fiction: optimistic, imaginative, adventurous, funny, exciting. Highly recommend all Schmitz stuff to everyone.
• Outlaws of Sherwood, Robin McKinley – a comfortably low-key variant on the Howard Pyle/N. C. Wyeth type of Robin Hood legend. It’s also very obviously written by a woman: it’s a lot more interested in the interpersonal relationships than the adventures, and is almost completely uninterested in making the villains threatening or the outlawry exciting. Not to say that it’s not a good book, only that it made me think fondly of the Toby Venables Knight of Shadows version.
• Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett – …✨…

  

• The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester – This has been described as The Count of Monte Cristo–in Space! It’s really not. For one thing, it’s about four hundred pages too short. Still, it’s a good story told in headlong pulp style, raw-edged and colorful, with just enough thought to hint at deeper meaning but without the self indulgence to pretend that depth is what makes it interesting.
• Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini – This is a historical fiction adventure-romance, not a pulp novel. You can tell by the way the protagonist keeps bouncing back and forth between different groups without making up his mind until almost the final chapter. Sidenote: during one of my college classes, Doc S was offering extra credit for reading “books,” preferably from his curated collection but also for various classics. I got probably an extra ten points by introducing him to Rafael Sabatini and also to this song. I wonder how Doc S is doing these days? (He also brought ice cream to the finals.)

Watchlist:

• Captain Blood (1935) – Accept no substitutes.
• The Buccaneer (1938) – Cecil B. DeMille’s first take on the Battle for New Orleans. This version lacks the star power of the 1958 remake, but it has its own charm. One of the things that older-slash-better movies do is a) allow there to be background characters, b) give them visually distinct appearances, c) give them distinctive personalities. Even if these personalities are individually over the top, because the characters aren’t on screen for very long, they rarely have the chance to become grating. You’ll notice this trick was used to great effect in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
• What Women Want – I thought I’d take advantage of a mild fever and watch something I normally wouldn’t.
  • Next time I’ll just take more pills and stare at the ceiling.

state of the author

Sick again but have progressed to the cautious eating of dry toast. Be back in a couple of days.

Loot Haul: under budget & ahead of schedule

Pro tip: show up when the doors open for the Giant Annual Booksale…not thirty minutes afterwards.

• The Long Patrol – Brian Jacques. (It was the first Redwall book I ever read and it has a special place in my heart.)
• Artemis Fowl – Eoin Colfer
• Outlaws of Sherwood – Robin McKinley
• Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson (I have never actually read this book or watched any of the movies all the way through.)
• The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (it doesn’t say “abridged.” It better not be abridged.)
• Grave Peril – Jim Butcher
• Tom Swift and his JetMarine, Tom Swift and his Giant Robot – Victor Appleton II
• Today We Choose Faces – Roger Zelazny
• The Hub: Dangerous Territory – James H. Schmitz
• Coils – Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen
• The Aeronaut’s Windlass – Jim Butcher
• The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
• The Chronicles of Narnia omnibus – C. S. Lewis

Fourteen books for seventeen dollars ain’t bad. (I did manage to resist, at another location, the temptation to purchase The Art of War: A Coloring Book.)