(no subject)
Baking, I sometimes forget, makes me happy. For the last three hours, give or take time to drink a margarita, eat some bread and cheese and debate groups and belonging to them, I've been measuring cocoa powder and blending softened butter and staring - I admit, a little crankily - at my 9" cake pans when I realized they were not, in fact, 2" deep. I forgot about the things I didn't get done. I may have even forgotten that I have Pickathon to pack for. I forgot I had half a margarita left. It's not that I didn't know; I just forgot to care, really.
It's because I love baking that I've offered, at work, to be the birthday baker. We don't do anything for birthdays. We used to sign cards, but everyone got tired of writing the same thing 18 or so times a year to people they talk to every day, so those stopped, and it kind of bummed me out. I like celebrations. I'm a greedy giver; I want to do things people like, and I want to be told they like them.
This is easy to accomplish with cake. So I'm started with my work-pal J., provider of Torchwood and other geeky DVDs, fellow Doctor Who theorizer and all-round super tech guy. His mom made him a Who cake. It was fucking awesome. This is just chocolate-coffee cake with chocolate-coffee mascarpone frosting. No Tardis with a button you can push to play the old who theme. No lollipops with stars to indicate the sky. But a cake, and the first of many.
(I started in August because a) it's fun to start with a cake for someone I'm friendly with and b) July is absolutely full of birthdays. We are a pile of Cancers. Which probably explains a lot, if you go for that sort of thing. There are three of us Sagittari and to be honest, again, if you go for that sort of thing, the fact that I'm the only one right smack on the Scorpio cusp probably explains a lot about why I'm not quite like the other two and yet we all get along just fine. Er, I digress.)
In other delightful but perhaps less flavorful topics, tomorrow I'm going to Portland to go see Andrew, I mean, Tom Lenk, do whatever the hell his one man show is, and this, I hope, will be as delightful as baking. Saturday morning I'll make the public-transit trek out to Pickathon, which is the only weekend-long music festival I can really imagine loving, small and cozy and centered as it is, where I'll watch bands, drink beer, hang out with fellow writer types and feel spoiled by things I feel too cheesy to talk about. Work people will be there. Friends will be there. I'm not taking my laptop this time, because that, in a word, sucked, but I will be posting the Pickathon diaries to my workblog later, in case you care.
Speaking of which, I watched Winter's Bone twice this week and you should watch it too.
What I have not done, and will not get done this weekend, well, the list is legion, and ever growing. For more than a month I've been meaning to start a more ... well, a less personal blog, one with my name on it, that says what I do and all that jazz. But I can't seem to bring myself to write the first post, to push the first "publish" button and say yes, here I am. This is bizarre and illogical, given how long I've been half-naked on the internet. But I want to be a little more focused and a lot less emo, there, and I want to write about things I never get a chance to for work (AND keep up the workblog better, which, well, I'll manage). I have a post to write about this superbly entertaining book about video games, and one about Inception, and maybe one about cinematic depictions of poverty, and one about the last season of Doctor Who, and I just keep not writing them.
Things to do. People to see. I bake cakes and forget I need to do things. I'd best not do this too often.
The timer is about to ding.
It's because I love baking that I've offered, at work, to be the birthday baker. We don't do anything for birthdays. We used to sign cards, but everyone got tired of writing the same thing 18 or so times a year to people they talk to every day, so those stopped, and it kind of bummed me out. I like celebrations. I'm a greedy giver; I want to do things people like, and I want to be told they like them.
This is easy to accomplish with cake. So I'm started with my work-pal J., provider of Torchwood and other geeky DVDs, fellow Doctor Who theorizer and all-round super tech guy. His mom made him a Who cake. It was fucking awesome. This is just chocolate-coffee cake with chocolate-coffee mascarpone frosting. No Tardis with a button you can push to play the old who theme. No lollipops with stars to indicate the sky. But a cake, and the first of many.
(I started in August because a) it's fun to start with a cake for someone I'm friendly with and b) July is absolutely full of birthdays. We are a pile of Cancers. Which probably explains a lot, if you go for that sort of thing. There are three of us Sagittari and to be honest, again, if you go for that sort of thing, the fact that I'm the only one right smack on the Scorpio cusp probably explains a lot about why I'm not quite like the other two and yet we all get along just fine. Er, I digress.)
In other delightful but perhaps less flavorful topics, tomorrow I'm going to Portland to go see Andrew, I mean, Tom Lenk, do whatever the hell his one man show is, and this, I hope, will be as delightful as baking. Saturday morning I'll make the public-transit trek out to Pickathon, which is the only weekend-long music festival I can really imagine loving, small and cozy and centered as it is, where I'll watch bands, drink beer, hang out with fellow writer types and feel spoiled by things I feel too cheesy to talk about. Work people will be there. Friends will be there. I'm not taking my laptop this time, because that, in a word, sucked, but I will be posting the Pickathon diaries to my workblog later, in case you care.
Speaking of which, I watched Winter's Bone twice this week and you should watch it too.
What I have not done, and will not get done this weekend, well, the list is legion, and ever growing. For more than a month I've been meaning to start a more ... well, a less personal blog, one with my name on it, that says what I do and all that jazz. But I can't seem to bring myself to write the first post, to push the first "publish" button and say yes, here I am. This is bizarre and illogical, given how long I've been half-naked on the internet. But I want to be a little more focused and a lot less emo, there, and I want to write about things I never get a chance to for work (AND keep up the workblog better, which, well, I'll manage). I have a post to write about this superbly entertaining book about video games, and one about Inception, and maybe one about cinematic depictions of poverty, and one about the last season of Doctor Who, and I just keep not writing them.
Things to do. People to see. I bake cakes and forget I need to do things. I'd best not do this too often.
The timer is about to ding.