Cimblog

... the shelf in our dish-drying cabinet spontaneously collapsed last week, sending the stoneware inside of my BRAND-NEW, ONLY USED ONCE slow cooker to fall on the edge of the sink and shatter, breaking several other pieces of crockery.



via MarlaneDesign

(The over-sink dish-drying cabinet is a universal Finnish convenience found in 100% of Finnish kitchens and kitchenettes that I have seen, and also a completely brilliant innovation which is incredibly useful even for dishwasher-having households. Unlike most amazing Finnish innovations, this one hasn't caught on much internationally - even the Swedes haven't picked it up, although an Estonian friend informed me it had been almost universally adopted there.

Ours, however, is ancient and the shelf supports of very low quality. This isn't even the first time one of the shelves has done this, just the most expensive one.)

Hopefully we can buy a new inside for the crock pot, but I've been busy since then as well as depressed by the event.

ONE TIME. I got to use it ONE FUCKING TIME.

I hate this kitchen.

In other culinary news, I'm now eating nothing made with milk or milk-derivatives including yogurt and cheese (except pizza), although I haven't given up (lactose-free) butter for baking and (lactose-free, partially) butter spread for sandwiches. As a result, I now

• keep paying 5€ for lunch like everyone else, but being forced to eat a SERIOUSLY shitty salad [INGREDIENTS: iceberg lettuce, sparse out-of-season cucumber and tomato chunks; topping: oil and vinegar that isn't even balsamic] because the vegetarian option's main ingredient at the school restaurant is cheese, or, to add insult to injury, the veggie option is literally ROOT VEGETABLE PUREE SOUP which is basically baby food, one of my favorite dishes and extremely easy to make without anything animal-related whatsoever, but Finnish people just love to fill it up with milk for NO REASON.



• can smell that things were made with milk. I was never able to do that before. I don't have the greatest nose, obviously, but it was a surprise.



• know that coconut milk over granola is actually pretty good, but the texture is weird.



• have discovered a new favorite oatmeal topping, namely peanut butter, coconut milk and sugar topped with banana slices.



• have been thoroughly repeatedly traumatized by the sheer overwhelming quantity of "paleo"-related pseudoscience that comes up when you put the words "vegan" and "recipe" together in the Pinterest search box. Which is perhaps ironic, since the basic paleo diet, from what I understand, is quite positive towards meat.

Blowfish "Ranuka" and "Rona" in Earth Fawn

The really great thing about Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is the combination: Roaring Twenties + mystery + ass-kicking jack-of-all-trades female protagonist. (Like, actually the REALLY great thing is that last one, and it would have to be pretty disappointing after that to get me to quit watching; but the other parts are also independently exciting and putting them all together produces an alchemy that's even more exciting than the sum of its parts.)

It also reminds me of a couple of medieval mysteries I've seen, but the execution of them wasn't really great.

I've already lamented that Cozy Mystery + Regency + female protagonist wasn't a thing (I lamented that a couple of years ago, before I saw Death Comes to Pemberley. I think I remember the book existed at the time, but I didn't read it, because I wasn't looking for Austen fanfic so much as a Miss Marple-like character in a pastoral Austen AU).

I just wrote a rant on Twitter culminating in the realization that my current ideal show would be like Endeavor + that episode of My Little Pony with the pastry thief. The detective would be a young, brash pony lacking somewhat in social skills who burned out of her academic career before being hired by the police, and she would be in the pastry theft unit, apprenticed under a kindly but somewhat less brilliant middle-aged pony with a very soothing voice, and she would solve a different pastry theft each week. Then there would also be a lot of pastry and pastry-making in the show, obviously. Mmmh, pastry. (I deleted the rant afterwards because it was way too long and also, incoherent.)

My favorite episode would, of course, be a locked mansion pastry theft because locked mansions are my favorite. (The episode of MLP with the pastry theft takes place on a train, which is obviously great, but it's not as great as a locked mansion.)

Next step: steampunk my little pony star trek parody comedy of manners... with dragons???

The problem with treating seasonal depression with sun lamps is that you're supposed to use them near the beginning of your day - in fact I've read before people recommending not after noon - and this requires that you are awake in the morning.

• My current class schedule is only on T/W/Th, and



• waxjism is currently only going to her work practice placement, which is Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, and skipping her classroom hours, which are currently focused on middle school level math.*
  
  *Literally. Like, converting percents to decimals to fractions and doing basic arithmetic with them.



• waxjism watches NHL hockey games live in the middle of the night every day and consequently sleeps all day every day except the aforementioned M/W



• Today, for example, the sun was up only between 9:06 (>30 min after my classes start, more than an hour and a half after I have to leave in the morning) and 16:21



• To throw my internal clock and my brain even more out of whack, I was sick for the last 1.5 weeks of class in December and the first 2 weeks of class in January as well as part of Christmas break. In that time I got behind my classmates, missed the essential orientation sessions for the new semester schedule, and failed to clean anything in the flat, which started looking EVEN MORE like the wreckage of a raucous party and/or small tornado than before.

So not only is it impossible for me to be awake in the morning of every day apparently, it's also impossible for me to even be awake at roughly the same times every day. If I imposed a strict sleeping schedule on myself of going to bed and getting up as if I had class every day I'd probably end up with insomnia in the four-day weekend part, and also I'd basically never see my wife.

If I sleep till the middle of the afternoon and then turn the sunlamp on for a few hours, I'm worried it will have me staying up even later.



And unrelatedly, eliminating milk from my diet has gone great EXCEPT that my parents sent a bunch of my favorite flavored cocoa mixes from the US in their holiday present packages, and even though they are the kind made with water and not milk, I have noticed stomach upset after drinking them - something that wasn't apparent before when I was consuming milk from other sources. Apparently the dehydrated milk in them retains the qualities that my digestive system dislikes. But giving up mint and raspberry cocoa entirely?!?!?!?!? - So it seems like the only alternative might be learning to make them from scratch so I can make them with a milk substitute, which is obviously much more trouble than making them from a mix. :(


But again unrelatedly, this time on a very positive note, my parents gave me a Crock Pot for Christmas! So now I need to get some recipes for it - I've never had access to one, and reason to acquire them, before now. Very excited. I only have one, which is my favorite chicken dish for Thanksgiving/Hanukka.

Since the beginning of December I've been sick like three weeks. (There was a break in between! Two different colds, and the second one turned into a sinus infection that stuck around for more than a week after the cold was over.)

Then it got down to like -17° C (it was in the -12 — -14° range last week) and I didn't want to run errands, so I ran out of the tea tree oil that I need for my face before New Year's and was out of it for more than two weeks before I dragged myself to the mall to buy more. (And it has a short shelf-life, so it's not a good idea to stockpile! I could buy a bottle in advance, maybe, but no more than that. As it is I run out around once per month. The bottle is only 10 ml.)

That was enough time for my face to break out in three places, ugh. Fortunately once I got the tea tree oil, its power to heal zits more quickly was still in effect. I'm sad about the red scars, though. Those are still gonna last for a long while after the zits heal.

Almond shortbread filled with gingerbread chocolate ganache soounds delicious, if a bit rich. I had been wanting to make some lemon cookies this christmas, but I got this recipe in a Swedish country living Christmas recipe magazine for my birthday, and they looked so decadent that I had to try them.

But from the very beginning, everything went wrong! First of all, these cookies are like shortbread, in that they are just butter and sugar with some flour in and dense as a post; but they're unlike shortbread in that half the butter is replaced with a solid 200g of marzipan. Butter for shortbread is easy. You just let it soften to room temperature, then beat it in the stand mixer. But the recipe calls for the 200g of marzipan to be grated.

It turns out that grating marzipan is a pain in the butt. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone ever, but I did think that chilling it first would possibly make the process easier. Probably not actually fun, but easier. That occurred to me after I'd done half of it though, and I didn't really have the time to wait for it to chill.

This recipe also calls for egg yolks, which is another difference from any kind of shortbread I've ever made, and when I was trying to add those I bumped my hand on the stand mixer and dropped half an eggshell into the dough. :| waxjism and I later spent several hours altogether picking fragments of eggshell out of the dough, because I didn't have any spare marzipan (though I had plenty of extra of all the other ingredients of course). Too bad I didn't just throw them out at this point and make gingerbread or meringues instead. :|||

So anyway, after this, instead of flattening all the dough into a cm-thick single cake and then scoring it in fingers or cutting out big circles with a juice glass like I typically do with plain shortbread, this recipe called for it to be rolled out thin. That's bad enough with a drier dough, but it's horrible with any sort of shortbread, as I have discovered over the years (chocolate shortbread and green tea shortbread are two of my favorite cookies!), because it's so oily. On the plus side, the dough does stick to itself, but on the minus side it also sticks to the rolling pin. I'm very grateful that we finally bought a marble pastry rolling pin and that we had plenty of parchment paper on hand for squishing the dough between, but very sad that we can't afford an island with an enormous solid butcherblock top because having to spread parchment paper out and tape it down in order to get a big enough working surface is really not fun. Also the edges of the paper kept coming up even though we taped them down. :|

NOTE: Wax's mom has a big flat silicone sheet for rolling dough out on and it makes it way better. I must go to Kodin Ykkönen and get one of those myself because it was GREAT.

NOTE II: I hate marshmallows which is probably why I never noticed before, after 9 years here, that they don't have them in Finland. I just found out. So I was like, "So what do you do for Rice Krispies Treats?!" and Wax says they don't have them; so there's my contribution to the next Bring Us Ethnic Food From Your Homeland potluck sorted.

The cookies did not brown as well, taste as good, nor have as nice a texture as the plain butter shortbread I sometimes make, which I think is partly the marzipan and partly the thinness. The hint of almond isn't a bad idea, but almond oil or extract would probably work fine.

And the gingerbread chocolate ganache filling (which was very simple to make out of dark chocolate, gingerbread spice mix and coconut milk) was fine, but the result was one of those TOO MUCH!! desserts, from my point of view. And I can't help thinking there could be a better use for gingerbread ganache elsewhere.

I was also a little bummed by my usual sugar cookies and never got around to making my usual meringues at all, and nobody made gingerbread in the whole family. I wish I had gone with the original pecan sandies and lemon biscuits and gingerbread plan instead. :(

Art "Harlem" in beige; Lola Ramona "Elsie Longboot" in black multi button
Dkode "Nabila" in brown & black
Art "Oteiza" in black & "New York" in black

So I saw a remark on Pinboard that perfectly encapsulated my sense of 'WHY' when reading a lot of old fandom fic, and also about my own teeniefic: "hilariously unsexy".

"Hilariously unsexy" certainly doesn't cover everything unique about old fandoms or teeniefic; it just captured the thought that had been on the tip of my tongue as well after reading a lot of old Legolas/Gimli fic (and also the problem with the ones I wrote) (not ALL Legolas/Gimli by any means, just a lot of it).

Obviously, writing sex isn't the only thing that gets better about one's writing with practice, but I started thinking about how that is true of all my teeniefic. Trying to write better sex is, I think, something many of us have struggled with, and I often got hung up at that bit in a story and went back to look at my older ones over the years, trying to analyze which bits I'd done right and wrong. So while it wasn't a straight upward trend in my own eyes - there are some I liked better and some I hate completely - in general, it got better.

I was musing that I actually remember the first time I read many of the stories that now appear to have glaring weaknesses in the sex sections, and I clearly remember liking them or loving them at the time. I remember finding them hot at the time.

"So in my defense, I also genuinely liked reading hilariously unsexy sex at the time," I mused.

But it wasn't that. It wasn't like I thought, "I'm going to read some sexy sex and I love that. Now I'm going to read unsexy sex and I like that too." (Not ruling that out. I do it sometimes. Getting the giggles isn't necessarily a detriment.)

Ultimately I realized that at the time, I couldn't tell the difference between sexy and hilariously unsexy sex scenes (has the word 'sex' lost all meaning for anyone else or should I type it a few more times?). I'm not sure it actually occurred to me that the world contained both of those things. I literally could discern no difference among sex scenes; they were essentially all the same to me, although of course, sometimes I'd like one better or worse, and sometimes I wouldn't like one, but that was usually a matter of squicks or wandering bodyparts or unreadable punctuation - certainly not a matter of unsexiness.

And then I realized something else. The reason the sex scenes in slash mostly all seemed quite sexy to me was that in comparison to the sex scenes I'd been exposed to until that point, they were. ( Read more... )

Even sex that is hilariously unsexy by fandom standards is usually sexier than the average published sex scene.

Only after reading tons of slash, for a long time, did the shapes of 'good' and 'bad' emerge from the mist. It was sort of the way I learned to distinguish between Swedish and Finnish vowel sounds that don't exist (or are grouped together as only one sound) in English. It took a lot of listening for that, just as it took a lot of reading during which 'unsexy' and 'sexy' sex writing became clearer and clearer.

And now, of course, the difference between "yö" and "öy", and between the various sounds covered in Swedish by Å, O, and U, seem blindingly obvious, just as bad sex writing does, but I can still clearly remember when it just sounded like Wax and my teacher were repeating the same exact sound over and over again and expecting me to hear the difference, like Lina's diction coach in Singin' in the Rain.

How many other people are having this problem where The Hobbit is mostly making them want more Legolas/Gimli?

Like, I think maybe a lot, because I’ve been getting waves of comments and kudos on the fic I wrote when I was a teenager which, in my 10-years-older eyes, is more generous than its quality deserves.

But it seems from a glance at AO3 that we’ve mostly seen a spike in Legolas/Gimli consumption without the corresponding spike in production. In fact, there’s been some, but the vast majority is in the form of spikes in Legolas/Gimli as a background pairing to (mostly Thorin/Bilbo).

I wonder if the level of interest would be enough to support a fest?

This post on Tumblr, where a few enthusiastic yeses have sprung up... not enough for a fest quite yet though I think (21).

I've never organized a fest! Anyone got any tips?