I’m in the midst of a vacation from work which started last Thursday and ends this Thursday morning. We took our annual trip to Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival, I’ve spent a lot of quality time with The Book, and in general, I’ve relaxed. Huzzah for relaxing! (Although, the joke’s on me as far as sleeping a little later than 5:50 am goes…The Daughter has to get up for school at 6:00 anyway. So I’m pretty much up at the same time that I’m up anyway.)
Yup, it’s been a nice vacation…and today we took care of another item on the list: my quasi-annual pies in the face.
As usual, I made a video of the event, and here it is. It’s quite a bit longer than usual, mainly because I didn’t have the heart to edit Mozart, so I padded it out to the full length of the piano concerto movement.
:: Dungeons and Dragons was created almost 40 years ago by Gary Gygax and David Arneson. Both men have passed on, but Arneson’s personal collection of materials comprising his creative work on the game was recently found in, of all places, an abandoned storage locker. Now it’s all going to be auctioned. Wow! I’m glad that the new owner of the locker wasn’t a putz like that guy on Storage Wars who is always searching for ‘collectibles’, and just tosses stuff aside if he has no idea what it is.
:: How in God’s name have I gone this long without learning about Blue Milk Special? This is a webcomic that is retelling the Original Trilogy of Star Wars, as a parody. And it is awesome. I spent some time this morning reading it, getting up to the Millennium Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley. I think that this one is my favorite thus far…but it’s got some competition.
:: Some recent stuff pertaining to that goofball fascination of mine, the pie in the face:
I saw this on Tumblr. I guess I’d agree on the first two, but I’m befuddled that a chicken pot pie has a ‘positive’ rating as a potential pie for someone’s face. I don’t think I’d like that at all. Especially if it’s still fairly fresh from the oven.
A reader e-mailed me this helpful bit of advice:
See? Pot pie is not recommended. (I wouldn’t recommend shaving cream either, because it tastes like, well, shaving cream. And meringue doesn’t stick, at all.) As for the delivery techniques, I have zero experience in this regard myself, but I recall from gym classes in school that throwing things isn’t my wheelhouse, as it were. Best stick with the push, I suppose.
Comics readers from the 1970s (on which I was a young one) may recall a DC Comics superheroine named The Mighty Isis, whose powers and mythology was derived from Ancient Egyptian mythology. (Hmmm…I wonder if her creation was inspired by things like the tour of King Tut’s treasures around the US….) She had a teevee show that was paired with the Shazam! show, along with her short-lived comic. In one of the issues of the comic, one of Isis’s fellow Egyptian gods, Set, shows up to try to force humans to worship him, and he works all manner of mischief, which Isis can’t stop because she’s not as powerful as he is. So she hatches a plan to show Set that he doesn’t really want to rule humans anyway, because they’re not sufficiently reverent of the gods. How does Isis demonstrate this? By letting some kid (from her schoolteacher alter-ego’s class) throw a pie in her face.
It’s a weird story (I posted the whole thing on my Tumblr), but kind of funny and even ‘wholesome’ in that “Hey, I can triumph over my foes without resorting to violence!’ way. And as comic-book pies in the face go, this one’s fairly nicely drawn. (Not that I have a huge sample size of such things to meditate upon…I remembered this one from when I was a kid, and I spotted the issue in an ‘Old Comics for Ten Cents Each’ box at a local comics store, and the cover jogged my memory.)
:: Finally, I note the passing last week of Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of the Beastie Boys. In truth, I wasn’t a fan, but that’s more because I just don’t grok rap in general. Not my cup of tea, although I do grant the artistry involved. The Beastie Boys’ popularity and influence can’t be ignored, but for me, their best thing was their famous video that included a pretty spiffy pie fight.
OK, that’s it. More Weirdness and Awesome next week!
:: Beth Howard, who has become one of my favorite bloggers, has been working on a book called Making Piece, which is about how she dealt with awful grief (her husband passed away suddenly at a terribly young age) by, among other things, throwing herself into pie-baking and from there to pie evangelism. Her book is now available for pre-order. I’ll definitely be getting a copy. I’ve found that learning new things, and becoming a bit obsessive about them, is a good way to (at least partially) deal with grief.
:: On the making of pie…I do love a good pot pie, although I hadn’t made one in quite a long time until last week, when I did what pot pies are for and made one as a way to use up some leftover meats. In this case I used leftover ham from New Year’s and leftover smoked beef sausage. The result was like this:
I thickened some beef broth with a roux and added some onion and sauteed mushrooms, in addition to the meats. The crust? Well…I really need to start making my own. This was a store-bought crust, one of those ones you unroll. The resulting pie was tasty, but a bit on the salty side. I’ll be revisiting the pot pie concept again soon, though — next week I intend to make some pulled pork, which I think would make an interesting pot pie!
Part of my problem with making pie crust is that we only really have one spot in the kitchen area suitable to the rolling out of a dough, and that’s our dining room table, which isn’t always free of obstruction. (Translation: we tend to pile an awful lot of clutter on our table.) Not that clearing the table takes very long, but it’s just a whole extra step, you know?
:: Speaking of baking pie, I wonder if this gizmo, which Roger Green e-mailed to me, actually works? It seems…well, it seems odd. Why not just bake two pies? How strange!
:: My favorite pie for eating has always been apple, which cries out for a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and some caramel sauce drizzled on top:
I just can’t get behind that whole “cheddar cheese on apple pie” thing, though. Cheddar cheese and sliced raw apples are great together, but…I can’t make the leap from there to cheese-on-apple-pie. Sorry!
:: Roger also e-mailed me a while back a couple of posts by Mark Evanier, on the subject of pies as comedic props (i.e., pies for forceful application to people’s faces). It makes for interesting reading, as Evanier spells out some techniques (here and here) for what he considers ‘proper’ pie-throwing. Basically he says that pies for throwing should consist of a crust outside of the tin or pan, filled with shaving cream. I suppose he may have a point, if your pie-throwing is part of some kind of performed skit of stage show or something like that. Quick clean-up and the lack of any souring-milk aromas are certainly desirable factors. But as for myself, well…I’m not a stage actor, and I sure don’t want to get hit with something that tastes like soap because it basically is soap! Nope, if it’s going in my face, I want the real thing.
:: Finally, some funny behind-the-scenes photos. Here’s Natalie Wood on the set of The Great Race, whilst shooting that film’s pie fight:
(EDIT: I couldn’t remember where I got that photo from…but now I do. And contrary to Mr. Evanier, it turns out that all those pies in that pie fight were real! No shaving cream at all!
And here is actress Mia Sara, on the set of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. For some reason she’s getting pied. No idea why.
My friend Lynda, a constant source of wisdom and amusement, has resurrected her once long-standing tradition of celebrating her birthday with a pie in the face (which is a fine tradition indeed, even if it’s not technically a ‘tradition’ for me yet). A teacher by trade, she offered her students an incentive: the highest-scoring student on a recent exam got to do the deed. Although she apparently didn’t factor in the possibility of a tie, so she ended up on the receiving end of two pies. Lucky her!
As she says:
Between landing my new job and making some excellent connections with people I care about, it just felt like everything in my life is swimming with blessings right now. I was so grateful and giddy with how things unfolded, what can I say…it just made me want to do another pie. Only this time I did it with a twist.
…
Life is sweet – and if you don’t believe me – honestly, there’s nothing to kick start your sense of humor like a nice gooey pie in the face.
I couldn’t agree more! Lynda and I have a long-standing agreement that if and when we ever actually meet in “real” space (as opposed to “cyber” space), we’ll mark the occasion with a hearty exchange of pies. What a blast!
So, last week was my 40th birthday, as I noted at the time. Because of work schedules, we rarely celebrate birthdays on the dates on which they fall; instead we schedule some time off as near as we can, and celebrate then. It was a great week, though, it really was. Of course, it got off to the perfect start, with this happening:
And the week really did stay about that good! I worked a short work week before taking a five-day weekend (which includes today, so I’m back to work tomorrow), and I wasn’t unproductive during that work week, either. Then The Wife and I had a nice couple of days off together, during which we took a little trip, and as several people asked me on Facebook and in e-mail, there were pies.
But more on those in a bit…random thoughts and stuff first.
:: Autumnal weather has at last taken hold in Western New York…which, for me, means “time for overalls”. That’s just one of many reasons why this time of year is my favorite. Cool weather means overalls, and time off means naps!
Of course, naps are always welcome, but there’s something about naps in fall and winter that makes them so much better than naps in spring and summer. Sometimes naps in summer feel like wasted time. Of course, that’s just humans, I suppose. Cats never feel like napping is a waste of time. In fact, I wonder sometimes what the evolutionary benefit is to cats of getting all that sleep!
I also wonder where cats slept before the invention of the cardboard box.
:: Car repair places irritate me. We had to take The Wife’s van in for some work, and wouldn’t you know it, they found other stuff wrong that really needs to be fixed soon soon soon! We’ll get those things fixed, but not at that place, which is almost certainly overpriced. The only reason we went there is that we needed to get the tires rotated, which is free since that’s where we got the tires. We also had them check the oil and find out what the “Check Engine” light was all about, which is where it all started. Luckily it’s not super-pressing, so we can save up money and then get the fix done. But ye Gods, I hate the “Hey, we found some stuff on your car!” stuff.
But hey, at least we’re not this guy:
Ye Gods, indeed! This, folks, is why I maintain a state of deep suspicion of other people when I’m driving.
:: The Wife and I made our annual excursion to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival this weekend. We discovered this festival quite by chance in 2007, when we planned a getaway sans destination. All we knew was that we were going away, but we had no idea where. I did some Googling and found out about this Festival, and aside from 2008 (when The Wife journeyed to see her ailing mother), we’ve gone every year since. But Ithaca’s quite a long drive from Buffalo (two-point-five to three hours), so we always stay someplace in Rochester overnight and then take the remaining drive the next day. This year we stayed near the Eastview Mall, and we had dinner at PF Chang’s, where we’d never eaten before.
We loved the meal we had there. They have a nice “dinner for two” menu which made the meal more reasonable than we’d even expected, and the food we had was really quite good. No, it wasn’t as good as the best Chinese I’ve ever had — that honor goes to a dim sum place in Toronto, and the Shanghai Restaurant, also in Rochester (Henrietta, specifically) — but it was certainly better than the local takeout joints we like to frequent at Casa Jaquandor. I took some photos of our food, and I put them on Flickr, but…they’re not very good photos. Too dark, really. I was taking them with my phone, and I had the flash off as the phone flash is an LED that makes everything look slightly unnatural. Sometimes I like that effect, but not with food. Anyway, we shared an appetizer of crab-filled wontons (pretty much the same idea as any “crab rangoon” you’ll get anyplace else, although much better prepared), cups of hot-and-sour soup (again, same idea, but terrifically prepared), and then we split Kung Pao Shrimp and Orange Peel Chicken. It was a wonderful meal.
And the place was packed when we arrived, so we put our name on the list and then went to wander the mall for a bit. It’s been several years since I’ve walked a mall. I remember the Eastview Mall from when I was ten years old — the place has been there for many moons — but it has more than doubled in size since then, and now it is positively massive, with several wings added since then that are actually larger than the one wing that used to comprise the entire mall. Lots of folks think that malls are dead, but they’re not; they seem to be accreting, though, so an area with a bunch of small malls eventually becomes an area with one big mall.
Oh, and for ten bucks I got a set of Star Wars cookie cutters at Williams-Sonoma. Score!
:: The next morning we departed Rochester (OK, Victor) for Ithaca. Someday I want to have more than just a single overnight trip for this journey, because really, I just love that part of New York State. It actually starts right in my own town, with the start of Route 20A, which is my favorite drive anywhere. It’s just a gorgeous drive, through the hill country that rests about ten to twenty miles south of the flat I-90 corridor. Sure, since we were going to Rochester I could have saved at least half an hour by taking the Thruway, but why do that? The Thruway has zero personality…and to drive it, you have to pay tolls. Ugh.
After spending the night in Victor (a southeastern suburb of Rochester), we drove the next day first through Pittsford and some of Rochester’s eastern suburbs and then farther east, through towns like Phelps, Palmyra, Waterloo, and Seneca Falls. I always love driving through these towns, with their central business districts lined with brick buildings, occasional crossings of the Erie Canal, and out in the country between towns, driving past farms and properties where the houses often look like they were built before the Civil War. Undoubtedly, some of them were. There’s a real sense of driving through history, I find, in those old towns. Waterloo bills itself as the birthplace of Memorial Day. Seneca Falls played a role in the women’s suffrage movement. And Joseph Smith originally hailed from Palmyra…which means that in the space of less than fifty miles, we drove through the birthplaces of Memorial Day, womens’ rights, and the Mormon church!
And then there’s the drive south to Ithaca itself. Because of the presence of the Finger Lakes, each one running north-to-south, between Buffalo and Ithaca, there is no ‘straight line’ route available. You either drive south, and then east; or you go east, and then south. We always do the latter, so we can drive along the shores of Cayuga Lake. The Finger Lakes are just stunningly gorgeous, all year. I adore that whole region…and at last, it was into Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival, huzzah!
:: On our previous trips to the AppleFest, each time it’s been a gorgeous, bright, crisp, sunny Fall day. This time…not so much.
Yeah. Brrrr. Luckily I wisely dressed in layers.
Cold, rainy, and dingy.
As usual, there was a pilgrimage to Autumn Leaves Books, with their nice stock of F&SF. I could spend an hour here, easily. Autumn Leaves is not your “typical” used bookstore, with dim lights and stacks of books teetering everywhere; this store is bright, spacious, and organized. This time I wrote out a list of books that I wanted to look for — mostly space operas, of course — and I actually found one. I also bought an SF book by LE Modessit Jr — I’ve never read him before — and a fantasy trilogy by an author I’d never heard of before at all. Why not?
It wasn’t all bookstores for me, though…we looked up a knitting/crocheting store for The Wife, and she loved the place. She’s developed a real love of crocheting over the last couple of years, and she’s always on the lookout for good places to buy supplies. She liked the selection, the bright organization (some yarn stores can be dark and depressing, she says), and the pair of women who worked there were very gregarious and helpful. Of course, I know next to nothing about yarn, so while she was looking at stuff…
…I was taking photos of myself in the mirror and of cool-looking yarn.
Eventually we warmed up with some hot cider…
…and had a lunch of waffles and fried chicken. Now, I had expressed some skepticism of this food combo when I first encountered it, but I must admit…it’s a terrific match! Loved it. Next year we’re getting two of ’em. There’s this wonderful little restaurant in the middle of the Downtown Commons in Ithaca that features waffles in what must be dozens of permutations.
Finally, after touring all of the craft tents (where we bought The Daughter a bracelet and where I bought The Wife a necklace-and-earrings set), we decided that it was time to start heading home. And it was a good time for that, too, because this is what the weather turned out like an hour or so later:
On the way home we stopped for dinner at a joint in Avon, NY called Tom Wahl’s, which is a burgers-and-dogs drive in…but the burgers were really very good and their onion rings are fantastic. It’s a chain in the Rochester area, and their root beer is awesome.
:: And finally, there was my favorite part of the week: the coconut cream pies. Four of ’em, thick and gooey and creamy. Mmmmm, pie….
Then to blow out the candles…
…and, finally, splat!
Here’s the video I made of this pieing.
Yeah, I know, it’s weird. So what? It’s also fun. Life is just too short to take oneself seriously all the time. Maybe I’ll get five pies in my face when turn fifty! A pie in the face isn’t exactly a birthday tradition for me — we do it once or twice a year whenever, depending on opportunity — but maybe it will be now. Pies in the face rule.
So, to recap: the Bills beat the Patriots; I get to wear overalls again (which, I might add, are all fitting better since I’ve been losing weight!); an overnight trip with my wonderful wife through the finest parts of New York; used bookstores; yarn stores; new jewelry for the ladies in my life; dinner at PF Chang’s; Star Wars cookie-cutters; waffles and fried chicken; burgers and onion rings at Tom Wahl’s; and I get hit in the face with four coconut cream pies.
This week we get another fifty-word prompt, and we’re told that pictures are allowed. So, in keeping with the prompt and my love of whipped-cream related slapstick, here’s my entry:
“This is what you do for fun?” he said. “I’m a mess!”
She grinned through the whipped cream. “I told you I’m a blast! Now kiss me, and try not to laugh out loud?”
“Too late,” he said, laughing, but he kissed her anyway.
We’re having a great time here on the Jersey Shore. It’s funny — I’m aware of the existence of a teevee show called The Jersey Shore, and that’s that, but when I was telling people that my family and I were going to the Jersey Shore, lots of folks grinned and said, “What happens at The Shore stays at The Shore”. And that sounds great and all, but it doesn’t make for good blogging. So, a couple of notes thus far:
:: It turns out that the tastiness of rum varies in direct proportion to one’s proximity to salt water. Rum’s great in Buffalo. But drinking rum when you’re so close to the ocean that even through closed doors you can hear waves breaking? Awesome.
:: I’m planning to sample some tequila later. I’ll just have it on the rocks, maybe with a lime twist. None of that licking-salt stuff; that’s just gross.
:: Yeah, it’s really hot. But late in the afternoon when the wind is coming off the shore, it’s very pleasant and can get downright chilly.
:: Kite surfing looks like more fun than anyone should be allowed to have during one activity.
:: I dislike tourist-trap pricing.
Reactions to world events:
:: The Pirates aren’t just toying with having a season over .500, but they’ve been flirting with first place. In fact, as of this writing, they hold a one-half game lead in the NL Central. This amazes me.
:: The NFL lockout sure has been “on the verge of ending” for quite a while now.
:: Thinking it over, it becomes clear to me that the Republicans have been getting a little crazier each year for something like thirty years. Every time election season starts to roll around, they’re just a little bit more insane. It terrifies me to think that as batshit crazy as Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry are, in 2015 (assuming an Obama reelection next year) there will a whole bunch of Republicans coming to the fore who are crazier than that.
:: Rupert Murdoch apparently got a pie thrown at him today. This disappoints me. I can think of few people less deserving of a pie in the face than Rupert Murdoch. But then, I’m odd.
:: And finally, it continues to amaze me that you don’t have to venture far from Western New York to see how much nicer folks have it just about anyplace else. Cities and towns with waterfronts, that let folks build things as long as they comply with certain zoning requirements, cities and towns that…oh well.
More upon my return to society. Having great time, wishing you were!
I’ve been remiss (!) in noting that MD Jackson of Skylarking has awarded me one of those blogging award things, this one called the “Versatility Award”. This is because I’m a versatile blogger. (I know, it’s just like the title of the award!)
So, as is usual with this type of thing, I’m supposed to provide seven facts about myself and then give the award to several other bloggers. I usually skip these steps, but what the hey…only problem is, after nine-plus years of blogging, I’m almost at a loss as to what facts I still can ‘reveal’ about myself that aren’t common knowledge to those who read this blog on any kind of basis, regular or not.
By way of a bit of navel-gazing, I’ve noticed a substantial drop in traffic round these parts lately. What I think has happened is that Google may have shuffled its image hit results, because those seem to be the hits that I’m not getting as much of anymore. I don’t expect traffic to ever jump here again, really — it may fluctuate upward a bit, but I suspect that my average number of viewers is pretty much calcified in place. That kind of bums me out, but as I’ve noted, it’s also a bit liberating in a way. I’ve wondered occasionally over the years if it’s my blogging versatility that’s kept this blog from ever becoming highly trafficked, but now…well, who cares.
Anyway, seven facts!
1. My first-ever job, as I’ve noted before, was as a technical-services assistant at the library at St Bonaventure University. I was one of several people who did things like put new card pockets in the backs of books, weeded cards from the card catalog, and stuff like that. I don’t imagine very many of those tasks are the same now…but that was my first real job. I went from never having worked to suddenly working eight-hour shifts during summer after my senior year. That was quite a shock to the system. I probably should have had a part-time job at some point before that, but in high school I was a social stick-in-the-mud and thus didn’t really need a whole lot of money over and above my allowance from my parents.
2. My current job at The Store, as I’ve noted before, involves the use of a lot of power tools, and I’ve grown quite proficient and knowledgeable about tools and their uses in seven years. I can do a lot of stuff, and it’s been a thrill learning it all and continuing to learn. I’m enormously lucky to have scored a job that provides literally years of learning opportunities and skills which will serve me well in other areas of life. And boy howdy, did I have a lot to learn. When I first got hired, in my first few days a manager asked me to put some paper towel dispensers up on several walls. He handed me a drill with a driver bit and some drywall screws and sent me off…but I had to go back to him for help, because the screws were Philips head and the bit in the drill was for slotted screws, and I didn’t know how to change a bit in a drill.
3. I have an odd fascination, as I’ve noted before, with pies in faces. I think a pie in the face is all kinds of awesome…but I hate seeing newly-married brides and grooms smearing wedding cake all over one another. This irritates me to no end. It strikes me as godawfully inappropriate and never makes me laugh. The Wife and I did not do this. Neither of us wanted to do it.
4. I’m not a fan, as I’ve noted before, of mashed potatoes. I don’t like the flavor or the texture, and gravy doesn’t save them, either. But mashed potatoes do fall into that odd category of “Foods I don’t like but yet always look really good to me when I see them”. Mashed potatoes on someone else’s plate look so yummy! So does pineapple on pizza, and so does sauerkraut. But I’m not a fan of any of these. (I do think that cooking meat in sauerkraut does wonderful things to the meat. The ‘kraut itself, I can take or leave. Like it on Reuben sandwiches, though. And just today I tried some on a hot dog, and that was OK.) And no, broccoli does not fall into one of those categories. Broccoli looks, to me, like it tastes: the Food of the Devil.
5. I realized a while back that in my current work-in-progress, the space opera novel, I’m envisioning one of my characters as Nichelle Nichols in the Star Trek III-IV-V era. I thought that the older Uhura really had this sexy, “Don’t make light of my opening and closing hailing frequencies because I can kick your ass without so much as reaching for my phaser” thing going on.
6. Vegetarianism isn’t for me, but I do like to explore vegetarian options now and again and am planning to do more of it. Veganism strikes me as an approach that makes some fairly odd assumptions regarding the suffering and ‘exploitation’ of animals. The ‘raw food’ movement? That’s the one that makes me want to eat a bacon cheeseburger out of spite. Judgmental? Sure. Hey, I’ve got limitations, same as everybody else.
7. To this very day I have never attended a single rock concert. The closest I’ve come was “Classical Mystery Tour”, a Beatles tribute band that performed with the BPO a year ago. (Which was, truly, a wonderful concert.) In all honesty, I don’t really think I’ve missed anything — except for Van Halen.
OK, there are seven facts about me. All of them are certified true, or your money back. Now to give the Versatile Blogger award to others! As always, this comes with absolutely no obligation to play along.
Jason Bennion of Simple Tricks and Nonsense blogs about his difficult relationship with his father, his sadness over the space shuttle program ending, his thoughts on movies, and occasionally his experiences as a fairly liberal guy with a beard living in deeply conservative, facial-hair-free Salt Lake City. I just wish he could post more, but judging by how often I see him post things on Facebook like “Yeah, it’s 7:00 and I’m still at the office”, I can totally understand why he is limited.
Lynn Sislo of Violins and Starships has been a daily read of mine for years, and I see no sign of that ending. She’ll put up a post about a sewing project and then blog about the science fiction book she’s just read, and other topics in between. Endlessly fascinating blogging from the wilds of Oklahoma!
SK Waller of Incurable Insomniac is also a fantastic blogger from the wilds of Oklahoma. She’s had a tough go of it through life, but she writes openly and honestly about it all. Hers is a musical soul, and she’s got a lot of songs to sing. I constantly wish for her to have a big success story.
Roger Owen Green of Rambling with Roger is the very picture of intellectual curiosity. He’s one of those folks who engages with the world in such a way as to always have something new and interesting to say. And he blogs every day. That’s amazing in itself, these days in Blogistan!
In truth, I could pass out two dozen of these and still have room for more; most of my favorite bloggers now are the “versatile” types. Single-subject blogs have to be very fascinating or well-written to keep my interest, and I’ve almost completely given up on political blogs entirely (I still have four favorites that I check in on, once or twice a week). I get the sense that blogging is settling into a niche hobby, like all others. But it’s still my hobby! Thanks for all the versatility out there, Blogistan!
I just learned via a friend on Facebook that today is Whipped Cream Day. I love whipped cream a whole lot — it’s wonderful on coffee drinks and hot chocolate; it’s awesome on sundaes and pumpkin pie and it’s magnificent to dip strawberries into. And of course, whipped cream is the key ingredient in cream pies, whether eating or throwing. So all hail whipped cream!
