Young Indiana and I had a positively splendid, utterly exhausting bank holiday weekend while Ted was off gaming. Saturday we defied the not-running trains to go to the zoo (a thing we would not have done if I’d known the trains weren’t running, but I didn’t find out until we got to the train station, at which point a bus was available, so…we went. Later than we intended, but we went.) We had breakfast out and went to the zoo and the lions were in fine form & I got…
I’ve done a whole 12 day streak with my Spanish DuoLingo. Dad & Indy were both interested in it the other day so I showed it to them. Dad started doing French, and Indy got quite excited when it turned out Irish was an option, so he and I started doing it together. A lot of what I’ve learned from doing the Irish is that I’m remembering a great deal more of the Spanish than I imagined (I had four years of high school Spanish but gave up in college…
Picoreview: Loving Vincent: an amazing work of art that proves worth it in the end. I’m not a particular Van Gogh fan, or at least I wasn’t before Vincent and the Doctor, which–I will fight you on this–is one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever filmed. So I wasn’t going to Loving Vincent because I love Vincent, but rather because it’s been billed as an astonishing work of art. And it is. They filmed it about five years ago and have spent the intervening time in post-production, hand…
“So what is apple butter anyway,” you ask suspiciously, because frankly that sounds pretty weird. It’s not actually all that weird. It’s really a kind of apple jam. It’s a baked reduction and you can flavour it in a bunch of different ways and I’m getting better at it and it’s getting better as I do. I believe it’s called ‘butter’ because it’s lovely and smooth with maybe just a hint of apple graininess in the texture, not because there’s any actual butter involved. It preserves FOREVER–the stuff stays good,…
Octocon was this past weekend, and a fine Octocon it was! I decided to do a dealer’s table at the last minute, and it went…well. I brought jam and books. About…70 jars of jam, and 30-40 books. In fact, I had to restock for the second day, because what I’d brought on day one had sold out to the tune of about 80%, which was sort of Beyond My Expectations. I don’t seem to have gotten a picture of the books on day one, but (first photo courtesy of, by…