The Aviary

Things:

- It's not actually going to snow tonight - the forecast says the snow isn't going to start here till tomorrow evening - but that isn't stopping me from still hoping something will happen and I'll have a snow day tomorrow.

- Every year, I do this stupid thing where I have Yule and it's a big deal and then it's over and I say "okay, I'm taking a couple days off from religious devotion" and then fall out of the habit of devotion entirely. This year, to the point that I entirely missed celebrating Disting. (Oops.) But today I did some devotion revamping, so I think I'm back on track for a while. (Till summer, which is the other time when I traditionally just kinda stop doing religious stuff for a while...)

- I have a new fun solo rpg tool that I'm really enjoying using - it's the Location Crafter. (Made by the same people who made the Adventure Crafter, which I also really enjoy.) I'm getting better at planning cool stuff for my solo games while also working in stuff that's going to be a surprise or that I can discover in play and the Location Crafter has been a fun tool in that regard. It's designed to randomly generate a location to explore, which is already cool and has the potential for surprises. You do this by making a few lists of things that might show up that you can then roll on, and it has options to include some random elements that you can discover in play. I'm also experimenting with putting short phrases on the lists without knowing what those phrases mean. In the one I'm using for my Ironsworn game, I have a location listed that's just "the black ash tree". In my tiny rpg, there's an encounter listed with "the Crying Child". I don't know what either of those things are or why they're significant but I'm excited to find out.

- The lemon cake I made this past weekend is extremely good. It's not quite as moist as I ideally want but it is lemony as hell and I love it. I also have several other lemon cake recipes to try in my quest to find the perfect lemon cake. I'm very excited about this continuing experiment.

Things:

- I am currently experimenting with putting less sugar in my tea. Tea is approximately 95% of what I drink all day every day and though I drink it hot (mostly) I was raised in a southern sweet tea tradition and therefore consume a probably unnecessary amount of sugar that way. Right now, I am adjusting to putting about 3/4 of my normal amount of sugar in my tea. It's not too bad so far.

- I recently started a new Ironsworn campaign and you guys, every time I pick up Ironsworn again, I am amazed at how good a game it is. Plus, I have a nice new notebook to record my game in that has fountain pen friendly paper, so every time I play I get to pull out a different pen from my collection with different ink and it's just such an enjoyable writing experience.

- In other solo rpg news, I recently realized that my tiny rpg is an excellent tool for both generating and continuing Stories*. I made up a couple of characters and a basic setting about a month ago and used The Adventure Crafter to give me a preliminary starting plot. I tell myself my Story the way I normally would throughout the day, but I occasionally pull out the dice roller on my phone (which has an option to make dice with a custom number of sides, so I can also use it for the oracle) to figure out what happens next. And when I had used up the plot points from the starting plot, I used the Adventure Crafter again to generate the next bit of the story. It's great - I still get to run through the emotionally pleasing bits as many times as I like until I have wrung them entirely dry of good brain chemicals (as is my way) but I don't get stuck trying to figure out how to get to the next good emotional scene because I have dice. Triumph, Galatea!

- The way the library works right now is obviously completely not ideal but I will admit to experience a certain smug pleasure whenever I get to tell someone that no, we are not accepting donations at this time and we will not take the 5 boxes of books you brought with you in your truck.







*I really need a better term for "my ever-growing collection of stories that are sometimes fanfic but sometimes about original characters; that I think about basically whenever I'm not focusing on something specific; that occupy my thoughts for anywhere from a month to upwards of 2 years depending on how long I can get those particular characters/scenarios to continue to produce enjoyable emotional content; and that, when I don't have one, I experience a sort of pervasive low-level depression," but I don't have one so we'll just go with capital-S "Stories".

I am off work today, because it is the first day of Winternights (as I celebrate it) and today I am making a cake!

One of the frustrating things about being a solitary pagan in a non-pagan culture is that we don't really have any cultural holiday traditions*, which can leave one feeling somewhat adrift when the holidays come along. A cool thing about being a solitary pagan in a non-pagan culture is that I get to make up and customize my own holiday traditions so that they suit me.

So I am making a honey spice cake and, if it turns out well, I can keep the recipe and declare that my honey spice cake is now a Winternights honey spice cake and make it every year. And then I get to have a tradition and a delicious cake.

Also! I bound off a new shawl last night (have to block it today) and my non-cake plans are spinning and watching Critical Role and maybe walking to the graveyard to give some cake and pomegranate seeds to the local dead population.

It is going to be a good day.




*There are certainly cultural holiday traditions for Halloween, which happens at the same time but Halloween does not equal Winternights (or Samhain or Dia de los Muertos or any other holidays that happen around this time). I love Halloween, but it is a separate celebration.

There is a special kind of frustration that comes from really wanting to cook something you don't have ingredients for and can't get for several days.

I made baked oatmeal this evening, planning to have that for breakfast for the next several days. (I'm doing an experiment where maybe I eat something other than a bagel for breakfast every day.) I had been planning to just pour milk on the oatmeal when I reheat it, but it occurred to me while I was making the oatmeal that, actually, the perfect accompaniment would be rømmegrøt*, which I haven't made since last winter.

I do not have the ingredients to make rømmegrøt tonight and will not be able to go to the store for them till Sunday. That is far too long to have to wait for pudding.

Maybe I can make it to the store on Saturday.





*Rømmegrøt is a Norwegian sour cream pudding. Traditionally, from what I understand, you eat it by itself with butter and cinnamon but it's also really good stirred into oatmeal or granola. Of the foods I have learned about due to living in an extremely Norwegian town, it is my favorite, though brown cheese is probably a close second.

Good Things:

- I took a mental health day on Thursday and spent much of the day at the Point No Point beach, aka my favorite place in the world. It was misting but not raining and I brought a waterproof blanket, tea, a sandwich, and some knitting and just sat in the grey outdoors listening to the rain for a few hours. It was incredibly soothing.

- Yesterday, I started a new solo D&D game, wherein I am playing through Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. This book is, basically, one big huge dungeoncrawl, where each level of the dungeon is designed for a successively higher character level, taking you from level 5 all the way to level 20. I'm playing a level higher than the book recommends and making a few other tweaks so that I can run it for myself with just two characters: I have an aarakocra figher and a kenku alchemist because if you can be birds, why would you not be birds? It's pretty great.

- In other rp news, today my sister, sibling-in-law, and I had session 0 for our Beam Saber campaign! It is not set in the setting we designed with Microscope because our Microscope game turned out too nice and heartwarming to contain a Forever War, so Sean has designed a new setting full of monsters and weird space magic that I'm super excited about. It's going to be very cool.

- Also today, I put flannel sheets and extra blankets on my bed because it is Autumn and it's chilly and I'm so very happy.

- If buying specialist equipment turns an activity into a hobby, I am now a hobbyist breadmaker because I bought myself a pain de mie pan. (I make a lot of bread for sandwiches and am constantly annoyed the the sandwiches in the middle of the loaf are bigger than the ones at the ends. Square bread is the solution!) It should arrive before next baking day, which is great, because I have a new-to-me recipe for Icelandic rye bread that I'm excited to make using it.

- I have convinced my parents to watch One Cut of the Dead with me this evening, which is an entirely delightful Japanese movie I watched last week and immediately fell in love with. If you, like me, have a love for charmingly inept horror movies, you should definitely watch it. Try not to read anything about it first, though - it's more fun if you don't know much about it going in. (For folks who are sensitive about horror: this movie does have zombies but is not scary and all the gore is extremely fake-looking and very goofy.)

I made bread this morning, and the bread recipe that I make has a step where you divide the dough in four, then roll out each quarter, fold the sides in, roll it out again, and then roll it up into a nice little spiral ball to tuck neatly into the loaf pan. Mostly, this makes the bread look pretty when you take it out of the pan.

Today, I sprinkled a quarter teaspoon of advieh into each wee bread roll before rolling it up and now I have a loaf of bread that is subtly spiced throughout and tastes fucking amazing.

So I'm going to have to do that every time I make bread now.

THERE WAS YEAST AT THE STORE THIS MORNING!

I haven't been able to make bread for weeks now* and now I can again and indeed started to do so the minute there was yeast in the house and I have never been more excited about baking.

Before the stay-at-home order, I made bread about every other week and when we started this, I thought to myself, "Oh, I'll just make bread every time I get to the end of a loaf - as long as I have the ability to make toast, I am reasonably happy." And then I ran out of yeast and fell into a despair.

I have made quick breads and Mom has made biscuits in the interim but they are Not The Same.

Yay, bread!





*Yes, yes, sourdough, I know. The thing is a) I have tried to keep a starter before and we have never properly gotten on and b) I have a One True Bread recipe and I don't want to fuck it up trying to convert it to a sourdough recipe.

A thing I like to do on vacation is take a food item that I want to try but haven't eaten before (or have eaten before but want to re-evaluate). This allows me to try things without people staring at me* and, if I hate them, I don't feel bad about then eating something else.

On this trip, my food-to-try has been anchovies.

You guys, anchovies are fucking delicious and I am now extremely angry about every piece of cultural white knowledge that I've absorbed which told me they were gross. I could have been eating anchovies my whole life! Why did I have to wait til I was 37?




*A pro tip for people who are friends with picky eaters: trying something new or re-evaluating something is stressful. Please don't make a big deal out of it. For example, I recently learned that rice is not intolerable but I still can't eat it around my family because they all act shocked and stare at me. It's awful. Don't do that.

Making pumpkin peanut butter soup and putting pumpkin honey in it, fuck yeah.

Some of the craft* things I do, I enjoy both the process of making and the object I've made. Like spinning, or knitting, or baking bread. And there are others, where I enjoy the object but find the process tedious or unpleasant.

Today, I have discovered that making jam** is definitely in the latter category. I love having homemade jam - not least because I can make things like melon jam, which I can't buy - but man, making jam sucks.

At least I do have a jar of homemade jam at the end.





*I'm using this word very broadly here, probably. I suppose my definition of craft is "something you do by hand to produce something useful".

**I already knew this about canning in general. Having homemade pickles in the pantry is delightful. Canning those pickles is the worst.

Today's experimental cooking has been:

- a gooseberry shrub! Because there were gooseberries at the grocery store and I've never eaten one before. Now I have! And I am making a vinegar beverage out of them!

- habenero-infused honey! Which bubbled over very badly on the stove, making a huge sticky mess, but now I have a jar of very spicy honey!

Also I made bread and granola bars and cauliflower soup, but those are all things I've made lots of times and thus are hardly experimental at this juncture.

Still! I feel very accomplished. And also very tired.

Today, Megan is coming over to watch Good Omens - I am tremendously excited about it - and in preparation, I am making an apple cake.

What I like about this apple cake is...well. A lot of time, you make something that says it's an apple cake and what the person designing the recipe means is "a lightly spice cake that you might possibly be able to spot a chunk of apple in". Not this cake. This cake is all "You wanted apples? How many apples do you think we can fit in a single loaf pan? How about you chop up three entire apples to go in the cake and then slice another to put on top?" There's a batter but that's really only so that a) you can still call it a cake and b) there's something to hold the apples together. It is 80% apple.

It is a Scumble Cake.* Good Omens is not Discworld, but Scumble Cake still feels appropriate.






*I mean, the cake is non-alcoholic but it is made from apples. Well...mainly apples.