Halloween Live Blog

8:00 All done. Lights out. Street is pretty dark already. Anybody want some candy?

7:45 Two young men sans costumes, from Cheney food drive, collecting canned food instead of treats. Gave them some tuna and condensed milk. They may not want to use it together. They also knew what a portal was.

7:30 Another half hour and I can turn off all the lights and go hide downstairs.

7:27 Large round mother cat with small round daughter cat. Unloaded lots of candy on them.

7:20 Bouncing ‘twixt door and blog and email.

7:15 All’s quiet on the Cheney front. No knoc….small child with proud father, both as pirates. Kid has no concept of modern business practice.

6:50 Whole family of ninjas, including Darth Ninja, who promptly attempted to break his kneecap on my porch steps. Had no idea what a portal was.

6:40 four young angel/dark angel/ ghosts. They knew what a Portal was. Gave them extra candy.

6:30 All’s quiet. Back to reading my netbook in the foyer.

No, don't pull it off the garage and jump thru it

6:22 one young man who looked like he’d come home from school (jeans, anorak, flannel shirt), put on a regimental tie, and went back out. Claims to be dressed as a businessman. Told him I teach in a B’ school and we’d throw him out. He pointed at my Portal cake sign, and said it was a lie, and left.

Terminal

6:00 four teen girls, dressed as Maid Sama, and a cat and as someone smuggling coconuts in her mumu. The signs confused them. They took the garage door hula hoop and put it on the porch. They liked my Velma t-shirt, so I gave them extra candy.

My Halloween t-shirt

5:30 I am handling all the largesse tonight, since MJ is off dogging it.

5:00 Put up the outer decorations — some Portal 2 signs, and some blue and red hula hoops. Portal 2 “cake” sign on door, “terminal velocity” sign on porch, “change direction” sign on garage, with blue hula hoop.

Not a lie

NOTE: All Portal signs stolen from Deviant Art, and were made by toadking07.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 111031

Harvested the last of the potatoes today. As I said, they are a cage variety (Viking Mauves or something), and, as I feared, they didn’t do well. They were in a regulation-size plastic garbage can. Dug down eighteen inches, and found only peanuts (we’re talking serious counter-squirrel-ops this winter). Found the first potato when I was armpit down — about the size of a cherry tomato. Found the second one a few inches lower. Double golfball size, and kindof…asteroid-shaped. Not one of the big ones, with the gravitational slumping thing, one of the small, barely accreted ones. The rest came when I was three-quarters of the way in, very nearly waist-deep.

Total yield. Well, …erm…one kilogram. Yep. 2.2lbs of rough-skinned, dark blue starch. Two worth peeling, six you need to peel but don’t want to (ya ever tried peeling an asteroid?), and the rest are cherry-sized. We’ll boil-n-mash some tonight. Maybe save some for oatmeal.

The peas, meanwhile, have apparently not been killed by the frosts, and are probably growing. They only have three weeks to get to the advertised date for harvest.

LATER: Tried the potatoes. Peeled, boiled, stir-sticked into creaminess. Used some vinegar in the water to hold the color. It did. When we poured the vinegar off, it held on to the color and took it with it. Color on the plate was an unappetizing grey-blue. Maybe Light Slate. Flavor, was only so-so. Next time, I think we’ll steam them. Of course, the problem with potatoes is that half a cup of mashed makes me gain a pound and a half.

PotatOats 3

So, the other night, we had corned beef and cabbage, and of course, we cooked the cabbage in the water we cooked the corned beef in. Then, we took some of that water out and cooked some golden beets we’d bought at the farmers market. And then, we made a gravy for the beets out of the thrice-cooked water. Despite all that, there was leftover fluids from all stages.

The cabbage-water was superb, when done with our now-standard oat/potato mix. If anything, just a touch too salty. Who’da thought we’d ever say that about oatmeal?

The beet-water was so-so. I could detect a slight beetyness, but it was probably not worth repeating.

The gravy, made with tomato sauce, onions, and a touch of vinegar, was, well, mediocre. Like I’d put ketchup on my oatmeal. Not bad enough for me to phone out for a breakfast pizza, but not worth repeating.

But that cabbage water. Fortunately, I’ve got about a cup left.

WeatherSpark

Found an incredibly cool weather site, WeatherSpark. You can get a graphical weather forecast, a historical overview, even a long term look at warming trends. The site is well designed and easily navigable, except that the home page is a little sparse. It doesn’t invite you in. Which is why I jumped past it and have linked to my favorite city.

Fun With Vocabulary

Sakura Taisen, AKA Sakura Wars, AKA Cherry Blossom Wars, is a game/anime franchise that I will be reviewing Real Soon Now. It’s a dieselpunk story that takes place in 1920′s Tokyo and involves a group of young women who perform in the opera by day, and control steam-driven mechs in combat at night.

Adapted from the Wikipedia entry on Sakura Taisen:

The Japanese words for “Imperial Floral Assault Force” (帝国華撃団) and “Imperial Opera Troupe” (帝国歌劇団 ) are pronounced the same way (Teikoku Kagekidan), and only the characters used in writing are different, resulting in a clever pun. Thus, the Flower Division performs as one during the day, and “changes characters” come time for battle.

BTW, the last character appears to be pronounced as two syllables: dah.nn, not dan. In the opening song, that phrase gets a ten-count.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 111024

Not much to report now. Peas are coming along. The tomatoes I harvested are ripening nicely. They are in boxen on the floor of the living room (don’t ask), which is right over the part of the basement with the gas heater, and so has the warmest floor in the house. Potatoes are still in the can, with the lid on. I might try digging one up and seeing how they came out. These are the Norwegian Blues or something like that.

Later: I dug up one of the potatoes. Nice and blue. Golf-ball sized and deep down in the can. I suspect we are looking at another four pound yield. Taste was OK. Nothing to write to the world about (er, sorry). Looks like it prefers to be mashed. I’m wondering if a Safeway potato and an eyedropper of FDA Blue #6 wouldn’t be quicker, easier, and just as tasty.

I won’t be able to do much garden cleanup until the peas are done, so I’m working on getting the tomato planters off the deck and over next to the garden, where I’ll dump them until Spring.

PotatOats 2

As part of my ongoing Oataku adventure (thanks, Kurt) I’ve been ringing the changes on the whole oatmeal-with-a-dash-of-potato thing. The more I use it, the more I like it.

It works well with both the one- and twenty- minute varieties of rolled oats (I haven’t tried it with steel cut yet), and the 1/4 cup:1TBSp ratio seems about right (a 5:1 ratio by weight). Any more, and you’re getting a non-healthy potato breakfast. It does take more liquid, because the potato buds soak up quite a bit. One thing I’ve found is that it’s best to add the potatoes at the end. They don’t have to cook, just rehydrate, and it makes stirring the oatmeal easier.

What you are looking for is a change to the consistency and mouth-feel, along with a slight potato overtone. Of course, if you’re using a big chunk of the spicy version of Golden Curry, cooked in apple juice, along with a tablespoon of apple jelly, the potato taste part gets lost in the ambient.

PotatOats works particularly well with potato-related flavors. Beef broth, for example, or wine, and a nice, sharp cheese. If you are not using cheese, you’ll find that it really wants extra salt. It also worked OK with bean-water, bringing out a more beanlich consistency.

Second prize is TWO months in Berengia

Past Horizons: Paleontologists find ancient rock art in Alaska.

I’ll never forget the year my parents sent me off for summer camp the far side of Beringia. Boy, was I bored. And uncomfortable. It was cold, even in summer. It was wet. Even the ground was wet, those parts that weren’t froze. You know how they teach you to dig hip holes so you can sleep better when you can’t make it back to the cave? Don’t try that here, ’cause your…hips… will freeze to the ground and they’ll have to pry you off with flaming sticks.

I did all the usual stuff you do at camp. I learned to get along with Neanderkids, despite their funny looks. I learned to grind up charcoal and mix it with bear fat and paint it on my face, so that I looked like someone with stripes painted on their face. I learned to make a lanyard from mammoth intestines, and use it to carry a buzzard thigh whistle — which is useful if you ever get lost and are dying and there aren’t any buzzards around. I even learned how to paddle a birch log. The trouble with paddling logs up here is that your feet freeze in the water, while your crotch is rubbed raw, because these birches make really small logs.

One of the other things we learned was how to preserve a mammoth by digging a hole in a pond and stuffing it in. The Cave-Ec teacher said it should last a million years. What she didn’t say was that only works in Beringia, and if you try it anywhere south of Denisova you end up with rotten mammoth. Not that there’s anything wrong with a nice well-rotted mammoth, but it does make the water taste funny, and you don’t produce any throwable smellystuff for a week.

Then there was the celebration of multiculturalism. Boooriiing. Even the Neanderkids thought it was dumb. We gathered in this big meadow, and beat bones on bones and sticks on sticks and sticks on bones and rocks on… you get the idea. And we sang grunts. And we got lectured on how we are all children of the lightning god, except for those who were children of the buffalo god, or the aurochs god, or the other rocks gods. And so forth.

That’s when I got into trouble. You see, all the Neanderkids were into making noseplugs — these round disks that you would stick up your nose to make it look bigger. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to breathe, so they’d drill holes in the middle. Well one kid, Uk, was really shy, and I stole his plugs while he was beating his rock and scratched “Uk loves Su” on them. It was hard, because we were all illiterate, but everybody knew what it meant. That got Uk and Su mad, and they both complained. That’s when I got signed up for remedial multiculturalism.

They had three or four of us in the class, which was team taught by a Neander and a Person. Team teaching is a lot like the slap dance. When one got tired, the other would come out and drag them off and start over. We sat at these rock desks with a really nice view of the ocean, to remind us that we could be out there logging (and freezing our toes off) and got lectured at for a day and another day. While our teachers were contradicting each other over which proto-hominid had richest spiritual and intellectual lives, I sat there and carved “Uk is a seagulls ass” in the rock. Of course, it just looked like a bunch of lines, but they were spiritually and intellectually rich with meaning. For me, anyhow. And then I carved “Su is a pile of otter offal”. That pretty well filled up the rock, ’cause it’s hard to get lines to alliterate. I would have carved more, but our teacher won the argument, and the remaining Neander faculty came and dragged off their former colleague, and they gave us the rest of the day off so we could all go down to the marsh and dig for mammoths.

Next summer, I told my Aunt Ja I’d rather get a summer job harvesting emmerwheat.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 111017

So, the temperature was scheduled to hit 34 on Saturday night, it hasn’t been above 65 this week, and it won’t be above 60 next week, and I decided it’s time to bring in the remaining tomatoes. Total haul was just over 12lbs, which makes the grand total somewhere around 25 or 30lb, I think. A friend said I should wrap them in something called news paper, but I checked at the hardware store and they didn’t have any. I have some old boxen with mulched-cardboard inserts that were used to ship wine bottles (laying down style, not the standing up stuff). I think I’ll use them.

The peas are still coming along. We’ll see if they can beat the hard frosts of November. There’s still another can of potatoes to be opened, but I am going to wait at least a week on them.

Sunday, I planned to rip up all the tomato plants, and the dead cornstalks and take them over to the mulching place, along with the remains of the Killer Rosebush what was lurking in the shadows between the fence and the ornamental weeds, as well as the trimmings from all the hawthorn and cedar and not-readily-identifiable trees that want to dump throwberries and leaves and bark and so forth into my gutters. That may or may not work out, but hey, Tuesday’s another day.

PotatOats 1

The Poatine Project got me thinking. Not about poutine, but about potatoes. They taste good, but are not as healty as oatmeal for breakfast…or maybe they are. In any event, adding some potato flakes to my oats sounds like a Good Idea.

The problem is, a tablespoon of potato flakes is a third of a third of a cup, and so will increase the size of my breakfast by that much. I don’t have anything against big breakfasts like that, but one of my constraints is that I not pile on the calories. This is important, because a tablespoon of flakes is not quite enough to give me that potato fix I crave.

So, don’t raise the bridge, lower the river. If I cut back to a quarter cup of oats, my breakfast size remains the same — 0.25 cup oats + 0.11 cup potato flakes => 0.36 cup, or just over a third. I can live with that.

Usual procedure. I’m using the one-minute oatmeal, plus potato flakes, plus two-thirds cup of water. Flavorants include a fat pinch of chicken broth powder, and a shake of poultry seasoning.

Result: quite good, with a different mouth feel and a hint of potato. This is definitely going into the rotation.