Yay, I’ve gotten my NaNoWriMo alternative chosen- 4TheWords’ 44 day Weathercraft Terrarium event.
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I got to talk to my best friend and my girlfriend made me blush, so it was a good day!
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Favourite videogame soundtracks on while doing some mindless browsing 
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that was something else we did on the first day!
we did go to piraeus but we didn’t see the warships unfortunately, though we did go to the archaelogical museum there and saw one of the battering ram prows of a trireme and an anchor.
everyone’s recc’d this but somehow the time slipped by to see it 
this one seemed really tempting but is a pretty far bus ride!
we also went to mt lycabettos and the ancient agora!
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A bit worried I might have come down with a cold today, so I took it easy and didn’t push myself. Ended up watching Police Story 4: First Strike. Nothing like a Jackie Chan film to make me feel pumped up while kinda lightheaded. XD
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Not exactly today: I’m leaving on Friday for my first trip to Europe. I’m spending next week in Antwerp on business, but taking a day and a half over the weekend to visit Paris.
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Baked sugar cookies with the kid. Riffing loosely on the recipe, and they came out delicious- (among many modifications: 3 glugs of ice water, two table spoons of brewed coffee, two finger pinches of salt, less than a cup of sugar more, and another cap of vanilla extract- I tend to use recipes as more of a loose suggestion of ratios and adjust as needed. Sometimes stuff comes out ugly, but always tasty.) They got the kid’s stamp of approval, and he high-fived me.
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I realized that covid might have also triggered my allergies, so I added an allergy pill to the medical cocktail I was already subjecting myself to, and suddenly I’m able to go more than 30 seconds without mucus running down my face and my eyes stinging, which is what I was putting up with for days prior.
Being able to do something during the day that isn’t blowing my nose and constantly washing the snot from my hands is more freeing than I can reasonably describe right now. I wish any of this was exaggeration but it’s unfortunately what my days have been like, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed.
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Got some important appointments booked. Boring but a weight off!
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I love cookie baking because the recipes are so riffable. Cake recipes, not so much. I have ruined many a cake by altering the recipe. On the bright side, I have also achieved some serious wonderfulness this way. But it’s hard to ruin a cookie. If they’re a little harder or a little chewier, it’s all good. Recently I’ve been trying to pack fruit flavor into pastry cream for tarts, with mixed success. I made a raspberry pastry cream that was out of this world. But citrus is hard because it breaks the cream if you dial the citrus up to 11. So working on more of a curd for citrus-based tarts, cause there’s no milk in a curd. I love how aiming for perfection in baking a single thing can be a lifelong experiment.
Positive: Our neighbor has a cherry tomato patch that is bursting with sweet little tomatoes, and she told us to come get them and so we have a giant bag of ripe little tomatoes right off the vine. Weird how there are no tomato-vine-eating worms here in NC. You can’t grow tomatoes in TX without major insecticides or hours of deworming by hand.
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Fizzed tomato-curd cake!
(Curd because there’s lots of acidity in tomatoes too, no matter how sweet they taste? I think?)
On tomatoes:
Last week I plucked the next-to-last batch of almost ripe tomatoes from our garden. They ripened for another week behind the veranda glass, and today I made a huge cauldron of simple pomodoro sauce. Small shallot, two cloves of garlic, one mild chili from the garden, and a handful of freshly picked herbs. (I hope I did not commit any mortal sins against traditional Italian cuisine, dottore @Piergiorgio_d_errico ?)
The weather’s turning, with much colder nights. Hopefully the autumn sun will just about nudge the last of the fruits still on the plants that last bit towards almost-ripeness.
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I looked it up, and despite citrus’s infammy for acidity, it seems most fruits and veggies are acidic. Apples, grapes, strawberries, blueberries are all in the 3-4 range on the pH scale, comparable to or more acidic to tomatoes and oranges. Granted, lemon juice has a pH of 2 and pH is a base-10 logarithmic scale. Even watermelon is slightly acidic, with a pH in the 5-6 range and the lowest acidity I could find among the fruits I looked up was Bananas at around 6.5, which is still slightly acidic, and the only neutral or basic plant-based food I could find is brown rice(even white rice is slightly acidic). Naturally, I only checked the pH of maybe two dozen common things off the top of my head, but clearly, acidity is more common in food than one might think.
Anyways, this year’s batch of Black Oak Advent-ure Calendars arrived on my doorstep today, as well as some halloween themed non-standard d4s(instead of the classic tetrahedron, the shape is like taking a cylinder with height equal to diameter, cutting it in half, and gluing the halves to opposite faces of a cube and rotated 90-degrees to each other, though more elongated than that with a potion bottle to store them.
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A few years ago I was given Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat as a Christmas gift, and it’s the best cookbook I’ve ever owned. It completely changed how I think about cooking—less “follow the recipe and it’ll work”, more “this is what the recipe is doing and how I could change it”. I imagine it’s all obvious to an experienced chef, but being able to articulate what exactly was wrong (“not enough acidity”) and think about how to change it (“add a fruity side dish”) was a gamechanger for me.
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Depend on what is a shallot… don’t worry on mild chili, should put the sauce good, if not excellent, for the “spaghetti all’ arrabbiata”
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A type of onion with a milder, more delicate flavor than the normal ones.
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Today I went to the doctor and found out I do not have a broken foot.
But I still don’t know why my foot hurts all the time, especially when walking.
On the plus side I made chili with hotdogs and chicken. It was yummy.
-v
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The FB Algorithmic Overlords introduced me to Cecilia Payne, who wrote in her 1925 doctoral thesis that helium and hydrogen are the most abundant chemical elements in stars (and by extension the universe). Her idea was rejected at first but later confirmed.
Here is her full doctoral thesis:
Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne (harvard.edu)
And here is the wikipedia page about her:
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - Wikipedia
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Got a haircut. Always makes me feel a bit better.
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I finished the audiobook of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (I got it because Toni is reading it) and I haven’t read it since I was in middle school and even though it’s really hard because trauma and triggers, I’m very proud of finishing not in spite of that but because books have been so hard for me recently. Similarly, I did a stream today and it wasn’t great but I wanted to show up and I did!
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Day off. I’m starting to get better at organising these (the pro of my form of self-employment is that generally speaking I’m in charge of my own work hours; the con is basically being on call all the time).
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