Whatta Fiasco

I had a very good weekend in many ways, and got reminded of just how happy I ought to be. I got to sleep in. I spent an hour at the gym making sure my back and shoulders would be good and sore on Sunday. I got to spend time reading and time with my husband. I went out to dinner with friends and had a baby soggy bread onto my shirt. I saw Dead Man’s Chest in the theater, for the second time, with friends. It was still good, even if Johnny Depp looks bored with the role. I got more time with kids. I got to make a last minute chocolate sauce for a fondue dinner, and it turned out well in spite of my attempt to sabotage the recipe. But I got lucky and all turned out well. Do not recruit programmers as bakers. You’ll want quality control people for that. Programmers generally don’t read the directions, or at best they skim them. (But I did measure my ingredients, so there. The good news is that if you add your milk, chocolate and egg yolks to the pan all at once, if you then heat them together from room temperature, there’s a good chance your yolks won’t go hardboiled on you.)

And now I have the perfect pairing for the classic angel food cake recipe. I like angel food cake, and I enjoy making it, but as a recipe it has a problem: it uses twelve egg whites. And only the white. So what do you do with all those yolks? Now I know that you just need to make a triple batch of the chocolate custard sauce recipe from Joy of Cooking. Chunks of angel food cake dipped in chocolate sauce would be awfully good. I suggest procuring a large bowl of ripe strawberries and/or other chocolate friendly fruit as well. There’s going to be a lot of chocolate sauce. In fact, I’d get some small, disposable tupperware style containers ahead of time so you can send the excess home with your guests. We only made a double batch and still had plenty left over. I was planning on making some meringue cookies, but we ran out of time. Those would be good dipped in chocolate too.

File this one under: Be careful what you wish for. On Friday I had my third lesson since Summer Nationals. My third completely different lesson, and I’m feeling a bit overloaded with items to integrate into my fencing right now. An embarrassment of riches and obligations. To recap. first I had the lesson on the correct angle for a take six, because I have a terrible tendency to both raise my bell and over rotate on the take, creating a condition where my opponent just about can’t avoid hitting the underside of my arm. Working on it. Then was the lesson on attacking when you feel the take, and retreating (with additional take and then an attack) when the initial take attempt is evaded.

Friday I got one of those lessons you give epeeists who don’t have a foil background. Specifically, I learned to different kinds of take eight. The first was what I no think of as a foil move. The take is just the tiniest thing, designed to disturb on opponent’s attack just enough to let you in if you’re very quick about. This was alternated with a more epee style attack starting with a double retreat followed by a strong eight and finish. Much brain food.

What a strange little book. The narrator takes a walk and chatters on a wide range of topics, personal and historical, loosely connected to the sights encountered. It’s one of those books that will stretch your sense of what a novel can be. Quirky, pleaqsant, and haunting.

Cyberpunk fantasy done with old school technology. I only have two complaints. His writing is uncluttered and straightforward, almost to the point of reading like a young adult novel. But that’s a silly complaint because it’s more a feature than a bug. It’s a personal preference that made it a little harder to immerse myself in the story. The second complaint is that when he rotates point of view amongst the major characters, their voices are too similar, and I suspect that’s a consequence of there not being enough linguistic fluff to sculpt into recognizable voices. In this largish crowd of bright people with interesting background, vocations, and interests, none of them indulge in flights of vocabulary or jargon? But absent those quibbles, it’s a rocking little book and I’ll be picking up more Charles de Lint in the nearish future.

Aren’t colds supposed to last ten days? It’s been ten days, damnit, and I want my lung capacity back. And some energy too. I made it to fencing practice on Friday night, but after two five touch bouts I had to sit out for almost ten minutes until I could breathe again. Toward the end of the evening I made the mistake of not letting myself recover completely. Result: no more fencing for the night. The muscles and the brain, they all want to go. The lungs have a veto.

So I spent yet another weekend being non-productive, only this time I wasn’t sick enough to spend most of it sleeping. But neither did I have enough energy to do much of anything. I spent the weekend orbiting between bed and couch. Eventually I’d get tired of it all and drag myself out into the ridiculously lovely weather, only to return home and crash. But somewhere in there I managed to cook a cute little trout stuffed with fresh basil. And I confirmed that I’ve apparently gone down another pant size. Here’s to hoping things get back to normal lung-wise this week.

And how twisted are fencers? I ran across an article (via gizmodo) about some computer enhanced clothing designed to prevent intimate partner violence by recording how hard the wearer’s body was impacted and then transmitting that data to a remote server, I thought, wow! I wonder if this can be adapted for use as a wireless epee scoring system?

Ok, short attention span theater is over for now.

It’s a decently paced and plotted murder mystery, police thingy (my knowledge of the jargon of this genre is woefully inadequate with no serious prospects for improval) with the extra twist (for this reader) of being set in Britain. In that respect it reminded me a lot of reading Christopher Brookmyre’s work, except he’s a Scot, which is even further afield for me. But this one is plotted around a near-future Britain where their use of public security cameras has been extrapolated not quite to a fare-thee-well, and then a girl dies on camera during a web cast. So the plot goes rollicking along with slimy industrialist, overweight goth girls, overweight greasy-haired computer techs, and a disgraced, down on his luck, no longer really a detective protagonist.

It was a fun read, but two-thirds of the way through the book, it suddenly struck me that every single character I’d read was a stereotype. Every single one. Yes, when you’re writing something plot driven, the characters can get a little cardboardish. But this went deeper. These were well detailed stereotypes, living and breathing in their cardboard way. I began to entertain the notion that there was an elaborate joke being played out, that these stereotypes were a sly bit of meta-humor. It would be a risky gambit, but it’s the sort of thing I can enjoy. Then I flipped to the inside front cover where I read a glowing blurb about how amazingly human all of McCauley’s characters are. Huh. It was still a pleasant read, as evidenced by my staying up too late one night to finish it.

This one got lots of good press when it came out from sources I consider reliable. And it does manage a pleasant low-budget camp with surprisingly endearing characters. But it just didn’t grab me. My theory is that it was released at just the right time to hit a slightly past-peak interest in both Elvis and JFK, plus too many big budget yawners at the theater that summer. Entertaining and pleasant, but not much else. Except for that final confrontation where a mummy in cowboy boots is chased down by an old man in an electric wheelchair. Classic and beautiful. The entire film is worth that one scene.

I wasn’t thrilled to learn that the next book by Elizabeth Bear I was going to read was not only fantasy, but set in Faerie. land of clichéd treacle. Fear not. Pitiless plot and shiny prose abound. If you’re like me, you’ll be looking forward to the next one. Oh yes.

This evening I finally left the house for the first time in over forty-eight hours. There’s nothing quite like a summer time cold and going through alternating fever and chills while it’s in the triple digits outside. A sore throat from coughing led me to anting some icecream. Unfortunately I’m not entirely well yet or I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to buy the cheap nasty icecream. Gritty is not a quality prized in icecreams. At least it was cold.

And I didn’t make it to fencing practice tonight, but on Friday things were quiet enough (people taking time off after Summer nationals) that I got another lesson from the maestro. It was practicing the art of when you feel the steel, go. When you reach for the take and don’t find the steel, back out of there. Lots of motion, and by the end of it, I was starting to get the hang of it. But now I have to wait until Wednesday night to try it out.

Right now, I need to go take some more meds and see if my bed is still there. Ready or not, tomorrow it’s back to work for me.

Seemingly more straightforward than the previous, Quicksilver, but the title should tip you off. Interesting technical details and political machinations. The rollicking gallop of interweaving two novels leaves me wishing more time could have been spent on a fe of the more interesting supporting characters, but there’s still onemonster volume to go. So far it’s been worth the ride. If the third one pans out, I’ll be putting the set on the to be re-read one of these days list.