Millipede Invasion
Last Tuesday we went out to the cinema in Lowell to see the long awaited Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The movies always have to truncate the book plots slightly but that said, it was well executed and a good watch. Micheal Gambon as Dumbledoor was very intense, and ironically, now that the character is dead I finally felt that he was a good replacement for Richard Harris. It would be great to read the entire series again but we both still have long lists of books we've commited to reading in the near future; I might have to settle for reading the final book sometime before the release of the next movie.
We spent the weekend quietly. We are four episodes off finishing Oz and are playing Assassins Creed in parallel. The graphics are simply amazing and one of the real high points of the game is using free mode to sprint across rooftops. The perspectives are convincing enough that I almost feel a touch of vertigo while climbing. In the virtual city of Acre, one of the scalable buildings is a repleca of the Chartres Cathedral. This weekend we also played Reef Encounter, Ingenious and Carcassonne.
Although we've faultered on finishing the last few recipes in Italia, we have still been busy in the kitchen. We feasted on Calabrian stuffed swordfish rolls for dinner last night and finished with a Cordon Bleu style chocolate charlotte. Julian has also continued to work on his sauces including the soubise, maltese, nantua, bordelaise and a mornay. If the weather holds we had planned to throw some sausage on the bbq tonight.
Possibly due to the high amounts of rain (at least 11 inches this month), we've been suffering from a plague of milipedes. We had a couple last weekend but last night the party really kicked off. I removed at least ten yesterday and have seen another nine so far this morning. We've also been having obnoxious numbers of house centipedes. And we're still fighting off random infestations of pantry beetles. I had no idea that they would be so happy to eat dried chili peppers. The upside to the rain and heat is that some mushrooms are reluctantly sprouting. Yesterday out in Acton we saw our first sulfur shelf of the year - a small to medium sized conglomerate growing from the base of a tree near the end of the trail. As it so often happens, the slugs and bugs had taken over before we got there. There were also a few painted boletes, some white agarics, and an orange lactarius that we watched white "latex" ooze out of.
We spent the weekend quietly. We are four episodes off finishing Oz and are playing Assassins Creed in parallel. The graphics are simply amazing and one of the real high points of the game is using free mode to sprint across rooftops. The perspectives are convincing enough that I almost feel a touch of vertigo while climbing. In the virtual city of Acre, one of the scalable buildings is a repleca of the Chartres Cathedral. This weekend we also played Reef Encounter, Ingenious and Carcassonne.
Although we've faultered on finishing the last few recipes in Italia, we have still been busy in the kitchen. We feasted on Calabrian stuffed swordfish rolls for dinner last night and finished with a Cordon Bleu style chocolate charlotte. Julian has also continued to work on his sauces including the soubise, maltese, nantua, bordelaise and a mornay. If the weather holds we had planned to throw some sausage on the bbq tonight.
Possibly due to the high amounts of rain (at least 11 inches this month), we've been suffering from a plague of milipedes. We had a couple last weekend but last night the party really kicked off. I removed at least ten yesterday and have seen another nine so far this morning. We've also been having obnoxious numbers of house centipedes. And we're still fighting off random infestations of pantry beetles. I had no idea that they would be so happy to eat dried chili peppers. The upside to the rain and heat is that some mushrooms are reluctantly sprouting. Yesterday out in Acton we saw our first sulfur shelf of the year - a small to medium sized conglomerate growing from the base of a tree near the end of the trail. As it so often happens, the slugs and bugs had taken over before we got there. There were also a few painted boletes, some white agarics, and an orange lactarius that we watched white "latex" ooze out of.