A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury...

Sort of a cross-breed recipe, this one.  Part spicy bulgar wheat, part jewelled couscous, part plain old quinoa salad.

...and, in fact, lunch today, was 'jewelled couscous' as found on the BBC food website, with tuna teriyaki skewers.  Last night involved sweet chilli sauce to de-dry the couscous, and today's lunch had the same, plus a little mini-salad.

In other news, I think it's nearly time to stick Big Warm Waterproof Jacket in the wash then retire it until September / October.

I have just received an email from Chaosium [ https://catalog.chaosium.com/
 ] to let me know their site is back up after, and I quote: "Our website was hacked on April 20th by an email spammer, forcing us to shut down the site to exorcise the spam demons sent against us."

So there we have it.  Dread Cthulhu and his assorted minions and fiends can be distracted from returning and eating the Earth by means of spam.

See, Preest?  There is a use for spammers apart from as rose food, after all! 

[ducks, runs, hides]

You remember I said the kitchen sink was a little whiffy?  We've found out why.  It's called an outside drain completely blocked with crap.  I guess something has moved a load of crud off the roof / out of the gutters.

Poked it with a stick, so it's unblocked and no longer quite so offensive in the whiff department., and at least we caught it before it had the /whole/ of the backdoor area awash with Nasty. 

I know where the *next* crop of bokashi vinegar is going...

Oh, and we don't have enough plants that need feeding to justify a whole 2-3 litres of plantfood, so the last lot all went sink-wards.

When do we want 'em?  Braaaiiiiiiinnnnnnsssss....

http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/kitsch-daft/crawling-zombie/index.html

But what would we do with it after the first five minutes?

You'd think I didn't have anything else interesting going on, wouldn't you?

You could be right.

Anyway, what I was here for, was to note that while I was looking for Things To Do with the cider-vinegar-ey smelling liquid that Bucket One is producing at the moment, I came across somebody in URP wondering about compatability of Bokashi Pickles with wormery worms; I was fairly sure I'd seem something about that in a previous bout of related Googling, so looked about a bit, and found this:

http://wigglywigglers.blogspot.com/2008/01/composting-worms-love-kitchen-waste.html

Of course, we have already decided that if we started a wormery we would probably kill it by neglect, so compost bin or garden trench it is for our Bokashi Pickle.

The liquid is probably going down the kitchen sink, as that's been a little whiffy the last couple of days.  Give or take a tsp of it to make 2 or 3 litres of plant feed, possibly.

In the heated propagator in the bathroom, we have two seedtrays wherein have been planted (last weekend) some habanero chilli seeds, and some jalapeno chilli seeds.

They appear to be sprouting, with - in the case of the latter - a fairly serious intention of taking over the world.  There are little bristly hairy-looking white stems pushing up out of the seed compost determinedly in both trays, though the habaneros seem slightly less enthused than the jalapenos.  I just need to plant the third tray for the hungarian hot wax now - I ran out of compost for the seed trays before I got to those.

I think I'm going to have to do something fairly creative to get them enough pot-space in the garden, mind you.  And if they all come up, flower, set fruit and make it to harvest, we're going to need a new freezer just for chllis.

Maybe that thing where you get a *big* pot, part-fill it with gravel, sit a smaller pot into it, part fill that with gravel, repeat until becoming silly, then fill the gaps around the inner pots with soil to plant in so you have a cascadey sort of effect.

Today is Blog Against Torture day

Why the /hell/ do we need one?

As societal indicators go, this is not a positive.

• Wash out Bokashi bucket No. 1 (it failed, we think because we fed it too much dry bread and not enough bran.).
• Take veg peeling buckets out to compost bin.
• Re-pin compost bin and shut lid.
• Figure out how to rearrange propagator in bathroom so one can get to unimportant things like the bath.
• Find a box for the yarn collection to live in, a space for the box to live in, and combine, together with cedarwood thingies.

Big pot, fairly finely chopped large fennel bulb, a head of white cabbage, a head of red cabbage, two leeks, a couple of packs of Sainsburys 'cooking bacon' (which is all sorts of sizes and shapes and v. good for the price - better than actual sliced bacon for this), all chopped up to about the same sort of size plus about six cloves of garlic, sliced (all the bulbs in the shop were a bit anemic today.  I picked out the fattest one I could find, but it's still a bit skinny - guess the horrible growing weather last year is to blame), some water, a tin of Scrumpy Jack cider and about 500ml of Olde English cider.  All in together, and currently simmering away happily, and smelling OM NOM NOM NOM.

Between this lot, we reckon on having dinner tonight and Monday (stir fry on the Sunday) and on Monday we'll add some fresh ginger and the pack of Merchant Gourmet vac-packed chestnuts I bought around Yule and never used (fried in butter with cinnamon and possibly a touch of chilli or paprika or something for extra flavour/heat) and then what's left we will freeze for later use.

We are not sure yet what wil become of the juice when freezing time comes around, but I rather favour freezing it down and adding it to soup later.

We are trying to get back into the Gaming following a bit of a lapse due to Hellfruit causing Himself to be late in from work more Saturdays than not, together with the fact that I don't seem to have been entirely cold-free since about October last year.



Additionally, I must dig out my character generation spreadsheets - it's a complex point-allocation skills thing, and much easier if you don't have to redo the arithmetic every time you find yet another skill you really, really need.

Apparently they phoned on Monday, and will be sending a replacement tap v. shortly.  Nothing so far, but we shall see. 

Having emailed them *yesterday* about the missing tap, I've received a mail in the last ten minutes, and they say:

Thank you for contacting the WRAP helpline.

I'm sorry to hear that one of the taps is missing from your order. I
have alerted the delivery company and asked them to send one to you
ASAP. They will contact you within 2 working days to confirm this.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Please feel free to contact us again via email or telephone if you need
further information.

Regards

WRAP Helpline

Quick, helpful response, gives a target time for resolution, also gives a helpline number, and not only that, this was done on a Sunday!

I am cautiously impressed...

Following announcements of Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's diagnosis, Pat Cadigan posted this on Thursday. She's right - a couple of quid from enough people and, well, who knows what it could achieve? Whether you add the bit about 'donation in honour of TP' or not.

I mention this only because it's an idea that needs to be spread about a bit; the scale of funding of research in this area is frankly underwhelming.

Since Thursday, the 'Match it for Pratchett' campaign has taken off, with the stated aim of matching Terry's own donation to The Alzheimer's Research Trust. They, understandably, are chuffed with the whole thing, and say they will try to track a total of funds received, if this turns out to be possible.

For those amongst us who are cross-Atlantically inclined, there is the Alzheimer's Association in the US.

I've put more cash than this in leaving cards for people I can't stand - I think I can manage to squeeze a little out of my debit card for this.

I have been having the run-down, dog-tireds lately, hence my ongoing absence from Life.  We may be making our way back to what passes for normality around here shortly, but there needs to be some serious kicking-house-into-shape soon, before we have to get from A to B by way of little tunnels through the Stuff, like a scaled-up ant farm.  Only not as extensive, unfortunately.

 A Nintendo DS has happened to the house.  It came with Brain Training.  I have to say, at first I was sceptical, but I'm feeling the difference.  I've been trying to get a complex IF - ELSE lookup table to work in a spreadsheet for longer than I care to say and after a few days of Activating My Pre-Frontal Cortex with my shiny new torture device, it just came together and is ridiculously elegant in it's simplicity.  It's a cascade, and if your first IF isn't TRUE, it's set to return the result of the next line, and so on downwards, until you get to a cell that says 'enter this manually' 'cause it ain't in my lookup table.

I was unreasonably chuffed with this for the rest of the day.  It's the simple things in life you underestimate in the 'wander about grinning' stakes.

What this means is that I can go back to my automated Runequest character generating spreadsheet and get it to do the skills and so forth for a 21 year old character, instead of your bog-standard 16 year old.  It's a long-term project, and it just keeps getting more and more complex.  If I were starting it from scratch, there are many many ways in which I would build it differently, and it probably wouldn't work.

Sound a bit strange, but they're really quite yummy.  I ran into the recipe courtesy of the very charming 

cvillette, and as we had just about everything required to hand, decided they had to be tried.  The hardest bit of the process is actually eating the things, because they're like miniature works of art, no two alike, and just beautiful.  Somehow, they look like they should be sweet, and they're not.  They're very salt-egg-subtle spices instead.  You should try them.

I could wish I'd started them the day before I actually did, as then I would have been able to try one yesterday, before this cold broke from the aching-sore throat-easily tired stage into the drippy-snotty-head-full-of-hot-cotton-wool stage.  Still, this is an improvement, as the previous stage involved intense aching in and around old injuries; I had not really known just how many indignities my left hand suffered through ten years in re-enactment until yesterday.  It appears not to have forgotten anything, nasty vengeful thing.

 

Based on something we saw Jamie Oliver do recently (Jamie At Home - makes me feel inadequate about my kitchen skills and my garden simultaneously, which is at least time-efficient.  And I lust unashamedly after his barbeque/brick oven thingy), vaguely remembered.  He used pork sausages and beef ones, but I had some pork and apple and some pork and sage and nutmeg ones.  Pack of 6 of each, still connected between sausages.

Lo!  We have Hellfruit-flavoured yarn!

It is remarkably like rough silk, and this lot at least is around the same sort of weight as the DK lambswool I may have previously mentioned.  It's also extremely black.  And, I notice, seems to have become entangled with little bits of gold tinsel.

Weird.

Reassuringly, however, it does NOT smell of Hellfruit.