Thai food

There were two of us for dinner that night, only two of us.
And despite eating naught but leftovers for two days, we couldn't find an appetite for much.
In the end we ordered a tureen of chicken-coconut soup and a plate of pad thai.
But the soup was creamy, and the noodles were cellophaney, and the rice crackers still sizzled when you dipped them in any kind of liquid.

Thank you, Bangkok, for being there after all these years.
Thank you, for being as delicious as I've always remembered.

A winter picnic

We went to see Skyfall in Wilton (the showings closer to home were all way too late for our tastes; we'd be getting home at midnight.) It was completely sold out.

Then we doubled back to the theater in Danbury, and I hopped out and bought some tickets. For tomorrow, because it was too late for tonight. And when I came outside, and passed Mom the tickets, we ate.

Dinner tonight was served on a red plate, wrapped in plastic wrap, wrapped in tin foil. A sandwich, cold turkey and cold sambal oelek to heat it up. Too-tart cranberry sauce. A banana, because I hadn't had one in too long.

And we ate out there, sitting in the car, the oddest packed dinner I ever remember having.

Thanksgiving dinner

The turkey was a twenty-pound behemoth that Mom bought because it was the smallest one she could afford. It was brined this year. It was also butchered; I did a disgraceful job of carving it. Dad taught me better, and I was genuinely ashamed of the hatchet job I did on the beast.

The guests were two in number, an old couple that Mom met from somewhere (I think the UU meeting.) The husband was the quieter one. The wife was an old German woman, a former teacher; we hit it off instantly, and talked through a bottle of champagne about Andalusada. (It's very nice to have somebody else who knows what Low German is, and can talk intelligently about it, even though she spoke Hochdeutsch herself.)

Dinner wine was white, with a nose so soft it was almost watery. Dry, yes, but fruity for all that, and fruity without being citric, which is a nice change of pace. (Why I say that I'm not sure, because I don't drink wine on my own. Maybe because most of the beers I've had this year that described their subtle fruit notes had overpowering ones instead.)

The non-meat parts of the meal were actually the best, at least to my taste. There was an enormous amount of spinach - collard greens, mustard greens, a few other greens, at least three pounds of them, all of which I'd shredded myself the night before, but growing up I'd still call it "spinach" and I'd still hate it - with what was supposed to be a cream sauce, but wasn't, because Mom didn't make it after all; and there were steamed walnuts mixed in. Perfect. There was chow-chow (totally out of place with the rest of the meal, and cold.) Sweet potatoes, as ever, and they had been baked faultlessly; I didn't even think to butter them. And there was lingonberry sauce, brought by the guests. Lingonberries.

Pies for dessert, pies and creme de cassis for me. And ice cream. Apparently there are two places on the planet that make chocolate lace ice cream; came as a hell of a surprise to me.

A memorable meal.

This week in Andalusada, 11/17/2012

This week was much less productive than I'd hoped it would be. A big part of that was because of something that hasn't happened much before: posting on both of my blogs about convergent topics, which occupied most of my week because it took so long to write.

Saturday, 11/10/2012

Yes, I mentioned it last week too, but I got one further post up before the library closed: the Maud Missionary, which I should've written last week. (Or not.)

• Seadling got edited a fair bit, to incorporate what I know about both Japanese pistol cartridges and to incorporate some details about Seadling as an ammunition company.
• Hispano-Baltic Texas had its foreign affairs rewritten, to state that it has some historic ties to Taiping China through Ross.

And so to bed.

Myers-Briggs for world-building

When I demiurge, I build offices without officers, kingdoms without kings, planets without people.

Populating my worlds is hard for me. People are so concrete, and stories are so ethereal. (Thinking about it, it's kinda interesting that the fictional characters I know the most about in Andalusada - certainly the ones I've already written about, and a few others like Simon Twice-Traitor - are the ones who are at least partly mythical, and that the myth gets fleshed out before the man.) There's gonna be thousands of people that need at least names and a bit of personality, and Andalusada isn't my only world - or my last. And thus far, the non-mythical characters I've written up (and the one I invented) have stagnated as stubs. Not a good sign.

For projects on this scale, I'm going to need a way to mass-produce persons. And last night, while I was editing Don Musa, I had a breakthrough, brought to me by the words "Myers-Briggs."

This week in Andalusada: 11/10/2012

Last week was unimpressive. This one, at least, got off to a better start.

Saturday, 11/3/2012

The first thing that was posted was a serial killer, whom I'd discussed with R. last week while derping about revolver designs that never really took off.

• While I was at it, I revised Mahdism a very little bit, not only to mention him but to specify that the Third Mahdist War was fought over a Spanish attempt at Reclamation.
• ...and then had to revise Reclamation, where I'd called that conflict the Second Mahdist War instead.

 And so to bed.

New Toledo

I think enough in GURPS format, especially for Andalusada, that it struck me recently that I could show off and back up a great deal of this by posting it here. Towards that end, and as a test of concept, I posted a writeup for the UCNA's capital city, New Toleto (or however it's spelled; I'm honestly not sure yet.) As of 1930, a tentative writeup falls below the cutoff.

This week in Andalusada, 11/3/2012

So here we go...

Tuesday, 10/30/2012

Only one thing was posted today: Seadling, and the several links to it.

• Evgeny the Old's writeup got cleaned up a bit. It incorporated the Regency that preceded him, about which I'll have to write more some day; it also found, for the first time, the term "polytechnical schools," which will also merit a page of their own someday.
• Which in turn required me to specifically mention the Technical Censors, the most important graduates of the polytechnical schools.

And so to bed.