Adventures with food
by Denise Sawicki on January 7, 2008

So, Darrell is getting really into cooking lately so I got him a pasta machine and this weekend we used it for the first time.. OK I used it... and it was kinda fun! I am just happy that I managed to produce a substance that was unquestionably pasta. I thought I would mess up. Then I got an eggplant and fried some up and made some version of Eggplant Parmesan. This is the first time I've cooked in ages and it felt good. Eggplants are neat, if you manage to get them breaded and cooked right they seem kinda like meat. Which I'm sure I'd appreciate if I became a vegetarian for some reason. Of course I didn't exactly cook them all the right way, I let my bread crumbs get clumpy and then some of them were not properly coated or properly cooked and they taste very definitely like vegetables. But still edible at least. Also I went to Target to spend a gift card and I couldn't really decide on any expensive items we needed so I just wound up buying groceries. Target has really good deals on certain groceries. OK, that is boring though, when you have a gift card you are supposed to buy something nice, so I got some Frey chocolate, which was delicious. I got the cinnamon and blood orange white chocolate. Sounds weird perhaps, and a lot of people don't like white chocolate, but we loved it! It had such vibrant and delicious flavors. Kind of reminded me of when I was younger and our Swiss relatives always used to mail us a big yellow box full of Swiss chocolate for the holidays. Well, nothing in those boxes tasted of cinnamon or blood oranges but it reminded me all the same. I guess the fact that this stuff is available "exclusively at Target" makes it kind of irritatingly non-authentic but I was happy to find it and will surely try some more flavors.
Then I ended the weekend by messing up and now I feel like crap. No I can't talk about it to anyone , just felt like saying that just to be irritating.
Prayer for the Paranoid
Denise Sawicki posts whatever she feels able to post without serious consequences Read more »

Vanity
So, is my new picture OK? Too weird of an angle? I think it is a better likeness than the old one because I look kind of worried and I'm hiding in a hood :P. Go »
stupid water
I guess I'm just not cut out for dealing with anything the slightest bit stressful. Well, I already knew that. So we had our all-time record flood and it has dropped almost 6 feet since then but now they are saying there is going to be a second crest of the river even higher than the first sometime in April. Go »
Another Irritating Thing
The Indian episode isn't the only irritating thing that happened with The Cedars recently. A while before that, Darrell received an e-mail from someone claiming to be from MTV saying they had listened to his songs on the Jones Soda website, liked them, and wanted a CD to consider including in their show. Now this sounds like an obvious fake, but the thing is, some research showed that the person who sent the e-mail does exist and does work at MTV, the e-mail address was verifiable, the phone number led to a seemingly legitimate voice mail, and the address was an actual office at MTV. Go »
D&D first impressions
So our books came yesterday and I've been reading the Dungeon Master's guide as scheduled while Darrell's been reading the Player's Handbook. It's quite obvious I am going to have to read the Player's Handbook too since there is not so much actual useful information in the DM guide. It has lots of pages about different playing styles, how to handle different personalities in your group, and weird stuff like how to write cryptograms, but not so much useful data on the actual rules. Go »
I love waking up early
I got up before 5, took a shower, did a bunch of my fun and addictive getting-free-stuff-on-the-internet activities, had breakfast, and went and found some treasures in Kameo, all before heading out to work at 7:50. That was awesome. We always go to bed before 10 anyway so what's the point hanging around in bed in the morning when I'm not tired. Go »