Entries from my personal journal
You know how when you’re explaining an idea to someone, sometimes you whip up a little sketch that makes things so much clearer? And yet, viewed out of context, the little sketch looks like an indecipherable scribble?
I’m considering starting a blog and posting these guys, just for fun, unless such a blog exists already. If it doesn’t, would anyone be interested in contributing?
The Benedictine Spread was a big hit at the beach firepit party last night, so I’ma share the recipe! Of course you can find recipes just by googling the term, but they all have some variation in them, so this is specifically the recipe that I used last night.
(Extra info: Benedictine Spread is a Louisville, KY recipe, so if you make it that means you’re all cultured and stuff)
Ingredients
– 16 oz neufetal cheese (the original calls for cream cheese, but neufetal is just sliiiightly more savory, so I used it instead)
– 2 cucumbers, peeled, seeded, and grated
– 1 medium onion, grated
– 1 Tablespoon mayonaise (some recipes use more of this to the point that it becomes a more dominant flavor, but I think mayo is gross, so I just use a very small amount for a creamier consistency)
– 2 tsp salt
– dash of cayenne pepper
Directions
1. Grate the cucumber and onion, then drain and dry with paper towels. This is an important step, otherwise the spread will get too watery
2. Mix all the ingredients together in bowl
3. If you want, you can add a drop of green food coloring so that it turns bright green and looks like the lost boys’ food from Hook. I just didn’t have any handy last night
4. Serve cold on chips or bread or whatever
I need ideas for field trip locations for Mr. Davis
When Josh’s cat-allergic roommate was in England for months and months, I used to take Mr. Davis over there for day trips. He enjoyed it very much, and I think it started the trend for his thinking of “car trips are okay.” But alas, Ryan has returned to the states, so a new venue is in order.
I did take him to our soccer park once, but he did not like the wide open space, and we crossed the street to the residential sidewalk instead. I’ve also taken him on a few errand car rides (he’s a star in the In-N-Out drive through line when we go for milk shakes).
He does pretty well in the car, but he seems unsure of how he feels about it from time to time. Often he’ll stay up in the front seat, paws on the windowsill, watching outside. If I leave his crate open in the back seat, he’ll sometimes climb back there and do repeated short, soft meows. I’m not sure what they mean, they aren’t his “scared” meow. Josh’s theory is that he wants me to know where he is.
Anyway, I’d like to keep up the trend of car trips, just because exposure to new places and people and experiences is good for him. Any ideas? Anyone want a cat visit?
Attention humans! This is a public service announcement. Oft times on our internets, there are contests that involve voting. Inevitably, someone involved in the contest will send a link, asking all their friends to vote for them so they win the contest. Pretty common occurrence, yes?
I just want to make sure everyone knows that these drive me mad. There is nothing worse than “hey here is an organized competition on which people really should vote on the criteria of the content itself but instead it’s really just how many people you know you can get to vote for you without considering what the contest is even about.” It’s an insult to the people who organize the competition hoping that people will treat it legitimately.
If I am linked to a contest, I want to treat it fairly. That means I would want to review the applicants and vote for the best one, not just vote for the person I know. Usually, the thought of having to go through all the applicants and judge them fairly is exhausting, especially if I’m busy or not particularly interested in the contest subject or whatever. So, I just don’t vote at all.
Be aware, that when you send me these things, and I do not vote for you, it is not because I don’t love you. It’s because IT DRIVES ME CRAZY WHEN PEOPLE DO THAT.
It would be easier, I think, if all content were stripped from the contest, and the criteria were simply “see how many people you know you can get to vote for you, for no reason, really, other than that they know you.” Then whoever rallied the most people would win! And really, that’s how these contests tend to work, right?
Ben showed me this awesome volunteer program he’s doing, and after looking it over, I signed up right away. Basically, you act as an e-mentor and penpal to a 3-5th grader. The kid reads books throughout the schoolyear, and you read the same books. Then you write letters to one another discussing those books.
The idea is to both get the kids excited about reading, as well as help them improve their writing and vocabulary by modeling it through your letters. It sounds great!
I’d been snooping around for volunteer opportunities because I feel like that is one area of my life that is lacking these days. It is difficult, though, with the busy and often erratic schedule of a game developer to create time for a regular commitment. This is something that I can slide right into my life and keep up with.
I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it until now, and I wonder how common it is in grade schools across the country. I will have to suggest that my teacher friends look into it.
Hey! Teacher friends! You should look into this.
This weekend was fun-busy and restful all at the same time, as any good Labor Day weekend should be. There was lots of Starcraft II, some WoWing, some Magic, some Critter Crunch, and some Halo: ODST Firefight mode. I sadly missed Rich when he was in town (sadface) but I did snag a lunch with Bryan Cash on his brief stopover (happyface).
The Starcraft phenomenon is baffling to me. Could it be that I wasn’t ever as bad at RTS games as I’d thought? Or was it the privileged one-on-one (or one-over-one’s-shoulder) coaching I received in the beta? Somehow or another, I’m enjoying this game, and hold my own well enough that Nick and I moved up to Gold League in 2v2 (I remain convinced that this is 90% Nick, but I do feel I am improving!)
I am still skulking around in the practice leagues as far as 1v1, though. Every time I muster up some courage to do my placement matches, it fleets away before I can go through with it. Right now I rely on Nick during 2v2s to help me identify stuff when scouting if the other guys are playing Protoss or Terran. At work at if I’m lunchcrafting and doing my practice matches, I do the same thing with Nick and Ben, yelling “you guys what is this that they are building what does it meeean??”
In theory, I should play some Protoss and Terran myself so I can at least have an idea of what the strategies and structures are. But, I don’t wanna. <3 zerg. Ah well, I'll figure it out eventually!
I am so proud of my cat! He did really well at the vet, wasn’t scared at all (though he was grumpy about being restrained to get his heartrate, and was absolutely affronted by having his temperature taken). He’s also in great health, so I feel reassured as a cat mom.
He had a little tartar buildup on his teeth, but the vet said we could safely wait until next year for a teeth cleaning, so I have a new goal. See, the vet offers a service where they can clean the teeth without putting the cat under, which would be ideal. But, Mr. Davis isn’t keen on having his mouth handled right now, so he wouldn’t be a candidate for that.
My goal for the next year is to train him to accept handling of his mouth, so that he wouldn’t have to get put under for the cleaning. Can it be done?? Only time, clicks, and a lot of treats will tell.
In other news, I’ve been playing Starcraft II 2v2 and occasionally 3v3 versus the computer with Nick and Nathan, and having a fantastic time. We’ve worked out a way to play that is great fun for me, but I don’t think it’d work very well against human opponents.
I’m not very good about dividing my attention between base management and then microing my units out on the field of battle, so I just give Nick control of the units and churn out dudes and send them his way, whiles’t he lays waste to the opponent with the ever increasing army. I’m like Hydralisk Depot over here, which is fine, because base management is fun for me. When Nathan plays with us, he does his signature move of “build a ton of expansions.”
We rocked the computer’s face for the most part, but after a faulty mouse incident, it was clear that Nathan and I are as defenseless as newborn puppies without Nick leading the forces. Oh well, it’s still a fun time!
It’d been a rough time for me in terms of sudden and terrible vertigo that plagued me for most of the work week. This happened to me once before about 2 years ago, and it’s probably just a viral inner ear infection or something, but I was out flat for most of the week.
Today it was mild enough that it didn’t interfere much with our adventure to the Long Beach Crawfish Festival! This was my second year for the festival, and it was tasty as ever with good music and an amiable crowd. I didn’t actually partake in the crawfish feast this year (those little crustaceans are too much work for the sustenance they provide), but I did hit up the booths for some jambalaya and bratwurst.
We also waited in the longest line ever for beignets, but to their credit, they were pretty tasty.
Hoping for a reprise of last year’s festivities, we walked over to the nearby arcade only to find it had been shut down. How depressing! No worries, though, for we all ventured over to Josue’s place to partake in some good old fashioned 4 player split screen Halo 1.
It was a blast! For a bit there I was back in my junior year of undergrad, in Rodes 2, pistol sniping (and regular sniping) an jaunting about Hang ’em High and Blood Gulch and running my Halo mouth just like old times. That game holds up incredibly well 🙂
It would seem that most shooters these days don’t support 4 player split screen, often because of the decrease in visual quality (we can’t have poor visual quality on our beautiful next gen games! It would be SCANDALOUS. I was not a fan of the original Goldeneye, but kudos to them for supporting it) or because it’s just not possible given how much the game squeezes the console. What was so common in the past has become rare in the hopes that “everyone plays online now.”
This, in my opinion, is a damned shame.
In addition to my platformer that uses Rock Band peripherals, the next game on the list of “Lisa’s To-Do Indie Game” list will be the ugliest freakin shooter known to man, made explicitly for the 4 player split screen experience.
But! Enough sighing for the lost past. There is WoWing to do and StarCraft to squeeze in at lunchtime and board games to play and D&D sessions to be run and Indie Picks of the Week to play through. Adventure!
One of my secret guilty pleasures is managing my monthly budget, which, I suppose there could be worse guilty pleasures. This month I hit my savings goal to get home for Christmas, so I can now start planning that trip.
It’s tricky to plan so far ahead, since I haven’t even done my first trip home slated for October, and since it’s inconvenient for most friends in the area to know what they’re going to be doing 5 months from now.
Last year I doubled up and went home to Louisville for Christmas and then to Pittsburgh for New Year’s, which ended up being a fantastic trip. This year I’m less certain of my plots, especially since I’m already worried about who’s going to catsit for Mr. Davis in October, let alone for 2 weeks in December when most everyone I know in LA will be out of town anyway (and I’ll need a fishsitter then, too)
I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure, but in the meantime, here’s a list of things that I miss about Kentucky:
1) Lightning bugs, as was previously established (thank you Eric for the video)
2) Thunder storms, even though they cause me pain. There’s nothing quite so soothing as napping safely inside while it’s storming outside. Except for the pain part, that is.
3) The smell of season transitions, which we don’t really get out here.
4) The greenness, which is something that Josh observed when he flew out to drive me across the country, and which I didn’t really understand at the time. Now that I’ve been in the desert-pretending-not-to-be that is LA for a year, I understand completely.
5) Katydids and tree frogs at night in the summertime
6) Autumn and trees changing color
7) Cardinals, pileated woodpeckers, and robins (there are supposed to be robins out here, but I’ve not seen any)
As mentioned on Twitter, I used plums from today’s CSA delivery to make dumpling-like pastries, thus called plumplings.
I essentially just used this tasty recipe for plum pie, only halved.
Instead of the pie crust, I split the dough into 12 balls, flattened each, put them in muffin tins, filled each with the filling, and sealed it up at the top.
They are nothing to write home about, presentation-wise, but MAN they are tasty!