I discover snow cream

So, my grandmother has quite the recipe collection, and finally compiled and printed up a massive cookbook after my mom and aunt started arguing about who would get the mass of unorganized recipe pages eventually. In the dessert section, amongst some very tasty unhealthy treats, is a short recipe for something called snow cream. I seem to remember asking about it before, and my grandmother went on quite nostalgically about how great it is. Apparently they would make ice cream from snow on the rare occaissions there was some in Arkansas when she was growing up.

Today my mom made a cobbler since we had some extra berries. Of course, cobbler calls out for ice cream, especially when my mom's boyfriend's daughter doesn't touch fruit with a ten foot pole. So out we venture into the fresh snow, looking for a grocery store open at 6pm on Christmas Day. I was hopeful since they've stayed open through holidays and even blizzards in the past, but apparently not so late. But with all the fresh snow, we decided to try snow cream. It is simply wonderful. All it takes is a two eggs, a cup of sugar, a cup of milk and two teaspoons of vanilla mixed in a very large bowl. Then you quickly add enough fresh snow to reach ice cream consistency (the whole bowl full in our case) and eat immediately. It probably helps that we chilled mix and bowl through dinner so they didn't melt the snow on contact. It's very light and fluffy and so quick for the satisfaction. We'll be doing this again.

Kitty is alive

Well, a few days before mothers were due to arrive, Arthur decided that he no longer wanted to eat at all. He'd been rather irregular at eating the last few days, even though he had been so excited about wet food before. After probably 36 hours without any food at all, there was a stay at the kitty hospital to keep him from starving himself. Then an ultrasound that turned up possibly a really odd cancer, but eventually (after more than a day thinking we'd have to put him down) a biopsy came back as a horrible infection in the lining around his intestines. The solution: surgery to repair the source of the infection and flush it out. At this point he was so weak that he could barely walk, and wouldn't eat anything except finally a few bites of fried chicken. Surgery was on Friday night, and he finally came home this evening. Of course, in the meantime he required a feeding tube, a blood transfusion (there are kitty blood donors!), and constant vitals monitoring.

He's down at least 20% in weight after his starving time, and he was skinny to begin with, so he now gets a whole can a day of special fattening prescription food. His feeding tube is still in (under the shirt on the other side) in case he doesn't eat enough. I don't think it'll be a problem. This picture is immediately after his first meal at home: a quarter can scarfed down frantically, after which he asked for more. Now he's feeling so lively that he wants to do everything forbidden that'll pop his stitches.

Tell me more

Ah, what use I could have gotten out of this little device back in the day. The best part is the endorsement letter at the bottom of the page.

Weirdly enough

It turns out that if you spend all day thinking about plots, you have shockingly plot-driven dreams. I mean, sometimes even novel-length ones that actually make sense. I do have to admit that I can't figure out why the one last night ended with a funeral. It might help if I remembered whose funeral it was supposed to be. Up until then, though, it was ridiculously self-consistent for a dream.

I go on about books

Since I've been complaining a lot lately, both on- and offline, about disappointing books, I thought that I should be fair and mention some stand-out books that I read this last year.

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
This is the most memorable of the lot this year: written in 1722, it describes the breakdown of society in plague-stricken London, 1665. Defoe includes a satisfying amount of facts and figures in with the story, which brings to life how the city experiences each stage of the plague. A remarkably modern work in many ways.

The Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse
Any BBC-philes out there will recognize these characters: the '20s upperclass twit Bertie Wooster and his ever-resourceful gentleman's personal gentleman, Jeeves. The books top the movies, of course, particularly as they are told through the incredibly silly narration of Bertie himself (with a few notable exceptions told by Jeeves). There's just one succession of crazy plot after another, all meant to variously advance, dodge, or break an engagement. They're simply wonderful.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
I suspect that I actually read this in '06, but we'll sneak it in here since it seems to have gotten me started on this year's humor streak. This book is just endlessly entertaining. I am still amused picturing the demon Crowley intimidating his houseplants into becoming the most beautiful and lush houseplants ever — he read that talking to your plants is good for them, you see. It's just a great absurdly hilarious world.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Yes, yes, how did I ever go so long without reading this book? In my defense, I'll only say that the first Heinlein I ever read was a late work, so I wasn't rushing to read more of him. This, however, truly is the classic that everyone touts it as. An interesting narrative perspective and a plot so well executed and believable that you could almost take it as a blueprint for a revolution. Just read it.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
I'm an anecdote addict. I like telling and hearing them, and, of course, no one can tell them like Twain. Mostly an autobiography of his time as a pilot's apprentice learning the river, the book combines anecdote, legend, and news reports to document a culture that had already vanished by the time of its writing. I think it was this bittersweetness that's the real appeal.

Lyonesse by Jack Vance
Jack Vance is probably best known for his sci-fi adventures, which are marked by fully realized worlds and remarkably well-crafted language. I thoroughly enjoy almost any Jack Vance, but the Lyoness books are unique as a tongue-in-cheek Grail quest in which the Grail is completely and utterly trivial. The real quests are for identity and recognition. Just don't expect any depth of character in the fairy-tale villians.

The Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books by Fritz Leiber
The original heroes of sword and sorcery — the books are really lighthearted and funny, too. They're all prime examples of buddy comedy adventure stories, each with the equivalent of Bond-girls.

I want Mexican food

Matt and I have been severely disappointed in the local Mexican food. The upscale stuff is all really Americanized California-style, while a lot of the mid-priced places are really bland New Mexico style. And with high rents in the area, there's really no hole-in-the-wall kind of places. I, of course, want spicy Tex-Mex — I like my Americanization in the Texan variety. Luckily there's one good family-run place within walking distance of our house that is more than adequately spicy and has pretty much become our sole supplier of Mexican food satisfaction. Unfortunately, said family is now under indictment for supposedly running a largish drug ring. All I know is that the feds better not try to seize our only fajita source.

I am disappointed

I just finished reading Camouflage, which supposedly won a Nebula, but I'm finding it hard to believe. The story mostly follows a changeling alien that wanders the oceans masquerading as various animals for millions of years, only coming out onto land to investigate humans in the 1930s. It spends quite a lot of time trying to understand and imitate us before it decides to start looking for where it came from. When a team of scientists unearths a strange artifact from the ocean, the alien's naturally on the spot.

The actual writing was ably executed — nothing spectacular but good. The beginning was interesting, and main character sympathetic, but the ending was foreseeable about a mile off. Unfortunately, the best part of the book was the chapter I read in the bookstore, in which the alien ends up stuck in the Bataan Death March, trying to understand this new aspect of humanity. In the end it is supposed to learn to love, which is carefully developed over a whole two scenes. It is just assumed that the immortal, multiple PhD holding, repeatedly married (and currently young and sexy) alien naturally only learns to love immediately upon meeting a middle-aged, slightly pudgy and admittedly desperate scientist. I'm willing to bet that it's old astronomy department was full of them. It's all so fast and superficial that we never see anything special, and what starts out as a story of an alien learning what it means to be human ends as an indulgent fantasy. Apparently acknowledging human suffering is so rare in sci-fi that it warrants an award even if the story is otherwise lacking.

I am good at time management

So, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month because I have a novel I already thoroughly outlined and like the idea of telling yourself that it's okay to write a crappy first draft so long as you do get a first draft, even if that means telling yourself you have to do it in a month. (Though, for some reason I almost decided to work on another novel idea that is currently without a main character, any minor characters, plot, or really anything except a world. I just really liked that world.) Of course, since the start of November I have started working on a short story that has languished maybe a year in the to-be-finished pile, revised a short story that I meant to do three months ago, and written perhaps a tenth of what I should have on the novel. The lesson: next time I want to finish some projects I should just set a hard deadline to finish something bigger. It reminds me of this essay.

I am a glutton for punishment

Well, both Matt's mom and mine have confirmed: they are both coming out to our place for Christmas. Cross your fingers for me.

I smell like butter

Matt and I have been trying to eat at home more often, both because we'd like to eat healthier than most restaurants make doable and wouldn't mind saving money in the bargain. So we've been trying out a lot of new recipes, mostly from our favorite cooking show, Good Eats. Some things like the granola bars have been big hits, but like any cooking show, the majority of the dishes lean to the unhealthy side. For instance, tonight I made Chicken Piccata for the first time. That's chicken pounded flat, floured, and fried in a metric ton of butter. Then you add shallots (the "vegetable"), white wine, lemon juice, and more butter to make a sauce so rich that you only need to wave your pasta near it. The result is, naturally, crazy delicious. The downside is that I'll apparently smell like butter for days, not to mention that I should probably take a year off my life expectancy. I don't think that one will be going into the regular rotation.

Fall

Well, fall is finally here: the trees are turning spastically, trying to figure out what's up with the repeated hot-cold cycles; the prairie dogs are so busy nibbling the last plant material left in their territory that they are no fun for Higgs to chase; and coyotes are foraging even in the day, occasionally teasing the slow dog for fun. Seriously, this coyote walked out onto a trail a yard away from me and didn't blink. Higgs went crazy.

Weirder yet, our neighbor found a bat roosting in his tree. Apparently our little mountains don't have enough nice rocky caves and outcroppings anymore.

I am starting to panic

So Matt's mom and middle sister are coming to visit third weekend in October. This really wouldn't be that big of a deal by itself: afterall, I've met both of them before and they're cool. Allison has never been out to Colorado, so we will have the standard selection of activities already laid out.

Turns out, though, that the weekend before that my cousin in Denver is getting married. I thought it would just be a good chance to see my aunts and uncles, and maybe, just possibly, finally lure my dad out for a visit. Turns out my sister already had the time off for an undecided vacation with her boyfriend when she got the invitation, so now I shall have my dad, sister, and the boyfriend I have not yet met but who my sister plans on marrying soonish. Right up until the day that Matt's family arrives. They might overlap, actually.

Of course, Matt's satellite was launched this week, and all the junior people get put on night shift, giving the satellite little bursts of instructions for a few mintues every couple of hours until it's all operational. That means he's gone 7pm to 8am, attempting to sleep from 8am to 5pm, then we make dinner and repeat. Meanwhile, there's a ridiculous amount of stuff that has to happen before visitors arrive (e.g., tons of laundry, clearing out all the boxes in the second guest room, etc.) that's too noisy to do while someone's trying to sleep, leaving only a few hours in the evening when I'd really rather watch a sappy movie while the cat complains that Matt isn't home when he should be. Luckily there's a couple of weeks still, but I'm starting to think the whole thing will be rather hectic.

Fourteener

Now I just need to get in shape and do a real one.

I prepare

Today: hike up Green Mountain to make sure that Higgs and I can do a fourteener on Saturday.

So I've been way slacking on hiking this year, mostly doing stuff out here on the plains instead of in the mountains. Now my friend Sinclair wants to go up Mt. Bierstadt, the easiest fourteener in Colorado, on Saturday. It's the easiest because the trailhead is at 12000 ft (nice!), and the approach is crazy shallow until the very top, but there will be very little air. Green mountain is in town and it's been a favorite over the last couple of years. The hike up is roughly the same elevation change and distance but 4000 ft lower, so hopefully we can still do it at a solid pace.

I dream about flying

I've been redoing this decaying old album for Matt of his great-grandad's war stuff. He was a flying instructor in WWI and again in WWII. He didn't seem to keep much from the second war, but we've got tons of photos and almost every piece of paper he ever touched in WWI. I've been scanning some of the interesting photos and put them up here. It's pretty surprising that anyone was willing to take those flimsy things up in the air.

I love the Internet

I watch too many videos

I totally stayed up way too late last night watching first newish OK go videos, then various OK go imitations, and finally some good Flight of the Conchords songs. In the middle of this spree I happened to IM my little sister, who was coincidentally home alone watching silly youtube videos, too, but of the stop-motion lego variety (by the way, there's actually lego OK go on treadmills, but I don't recommend it). The only redeeming feature of the evening was that I found the Futurama DVD trailer, which pleased me immensely.

To make my day even better, I just discovered that my favorite show as a kid, Get Smart, is being revived as a movie with Steve Carrell. Nevermind that I kinda can't stand Get Smart as an adult, I'm convinced that it'll be genius.

I am intrigued

Two MIT architecture grad students propose building what they're calling a Crowd Farm that converts the energy of people walking through train stations and such into electricity. They think it'll be fun to have more activity feedback into, for instance, louder concerts. I already think crowds are annoying, and they're not really selling them by making them moreso. Still a funny idea.

Harry Potter, Harry Potter!

Despite having been 111th on the library's hold list, I have magically gotten the new Harry Potter at last!

In other news, thanks to Elizabeth, I found out that Katie has an album out and have been listening to some samples. A freaking amazing album. Everyone should check it out.

I am flabbergasted

Sticking your eyeball in a particle beam to tell if it's on or not is one thing, seeing the bones in your arm through your closed eyelids is a whole other story.

Warm, warmer, hot

Usually the summers around here aren't too bad. It's pretty dry, so it cools off at night and stays okay in the shade, and half the time it rains in the afternoon, squelching the hottest part of the day and accelerating evening cool-down. No such luck this year. It's been freaking ridiculous. And, of course, we have no A/C, so we spent the last two afternoons napping in the basement rather pathetically. Meanwhile Higgs is camped on the landing, whose tile is no match for this heat, because the basement is the kitty's domain.

I see Julius Caesar

Matt and I have been going to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival again this season. (Although they replaced the Shakespeare improv group with two kid-friendly plays we're so skipping.) The first was Midsummer Night's Dream, which I think I've seen quite enough now. Their performance wasn't spectacular either, and the clown-like costumes on the fairy king and queen were very distracting. It was, however, the best version of the mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe, which made up for a lot. And then The Servant of Two Masters, one of their non-Shakespeare selections, was played a little too screwball. I'm also sure it probably had a lot of wordplay in the original Italian, none of which made it into the English. There was one stand-out performance in the part of Florindo. He carried this outlandish smile of naîve confindence throughout the play, and managed to strike such ridiculous poses in all seriousness. It really made the whole play actually stand up.

Turns out the same actor was in Julius Caesar as Mark Antony. Well now, this is a bit of an intriguing change. So we go to see the opening last night, and it was really well done. We were very impressed with The Tempest last year, particularly since it's a more difficult play, but I rather think this Julius Caesar was right up there. Matt, of course, prefers more traditional performances. They set it a few decades in the future, with all the familiar dystopian scenery and costume choices (a big pile of wrecked TVs; drab, utilitarian but rather ill-fitting clothes; a prophetess with strange cords connecting to her body and a screen over an eye). They also rather enjoyed all the blood in the play. They did intermission just as first blade is inches from Caesar, then began right up again there complete with techno music killing frenzy. It really did play like a movie version for the stage, right down to the servant putting Cassius out of "her" misery with a bullet to the head after she falls on her sword. Aside from all that, though, the performances by the leads were quite good, particularly Antony, who pulls off being more sympathetic than usual, which just makes you uneasy with both sides' choices. Also, they made Octavian a total spaz who stabs a beer can with a knife to drink it. It worked surprisingly well with the lines.

The kitty has us well-trained

There are several unique things about Matt's cat, Arthur (amongst them that he acts like he's really a dog most of the time). One of his quirks is that he doesn't meow so much as chirp. It's like his vocal cords are so unused to producing noise that he can just barely croak out a short little sound. Since the dog moved in he has learned to be louder, almost managing a soft quarter-meow on a regular basis, in order to compete for attention.

Last night, in the middle of a dream, I suddenly hear these two soft but real sustained meows coming from inside the room. Matt and I are immediately awake and looking for kitty, thinking he must be dying or something. Of course, he's actually just having a little kitty dream; that's why he made full meow sounds. This means that all four members of our house talk in their sleep.

In other news, last night Higgs finally discovered where I hide his old and surplus toys under the bed.

I bite off more than I can chew

So the other day I decided that one of my stories requires some alliterative verse poetry. Actually, I decided that it should have rather a significant amount of alliterative poetry. Problem: As much as I can't resist alliterating in prose, I've never written alliterative poetry. In fact, I haven't written any poetry at all in maybe eight years (and looking back at that, never any good poetry). I'm not really sure what I was thinking, but this has sort of fixed in my mind now. I rather think that I need to stop reading Germanic epics and Tolkien lectures.

I talk too much about German movies

I was rather surprised recently when I saw a preview for No Reservations, a new Catherine Zeta-Jones romantic comedy, and recognized it as a remake of the German movie Mostly Martha. Mostly Martha is the story of an obsessive, emotionally isolated chef at a top restaurant whose life changes when she finds herself caring for her orphaned niece while trying to deal with the easy-going Italian chef brought in to help at the restaurant. Martha is the kind of person who, when ordered by her boss to attend therapy, spends her appointments quietly discussing various methods for preparing pigeon. The problem is that I can't see Catherine Zeta-Jones playing this role as anything but outgoing, flirtatious Catherine Zeta-Jones, rather than the reserved, slightly awkward character that made the original work. This is a very bad omen for the remake, and I anticipate yet another horribly cookie cutter romanic comedy. I am hating Hollywood right now.

On the subject of German movies, I saw The Lives of Others when it was out in theaters and it was probably one of my favorite movies this year. It's about a German Stasi officer observing a playwright, eventually becoming drawn into his life. The AV Club bemoaned it's lack of cross-cutting and other distractions to "keep the audience wound up", but that's part of what I liked about it. The tone of the movie matched the quiet stoicism of the main character himself, and the whole thing came together to feel more real than most movies. Matt seems to have liked it a lot, too, although he's probably tired of me talking about it by now.

It's not German, but I also have to recommend the Norwegian comedy Kitchen Stories, about an efficiency expert in early 50s Sweden sent out to observe the habits an uncooperative Norewegian farmer. The study requires that he regularly sit in a high chair in the corner of the room without speaking to the subject for weeks, which leads to funny situations but also makes you painfully aware of their mutual isolation. I just randomly picked this up off the shelf without looking too closely, and was very pleasantly surprised. Being yet another movie on voyeurism, it is also rather quiet, but interspersed with both hilarious and touching moments.

Update 25.7.07: Sadly, the actor who played the Stasi officer so movingly in The Lives of Others has died.