Campfire baking!

Problem: A surplus of overripe bananas.

Solution: Make banana bread.

Problem: It was 95 F yesterday. No way was I going to fire up the oven for an hour.

Solution: Since I was grilling dinner yesterday, I poured the batter into a cast iron Dutch oven and plopped it onto the coals when dinner was finished. It baked in about half the time a loaf pan takes.

The Verdict: Possibly, should have put the Dutch oven on a grate over the coals and covered the grill. Bottom 1/4" totally burned. Removing that, we had some pretty decent banana bread with just a hint of smokey/burnt flavor. If I'd cut more off of the bottom, probably could have gotten rid of that, too.

I also feel virtuously economical for having gotten more cooking mileage out of the charcoal.

Quote of the Day

"Catholics: Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of Catholicism: discuss). Catholics all wear matching uniforms, and are divided into "parishes," or "squadrons," to make choosing softball teams easier. Catholics are rigidly controlled by a hidebound hierarchy that starts with priests and ends with priests' housekeepers. Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible, eat meat, or refrain from worshipping statues."

- From holyoffice's cheat sheet on Christianity

princeofcairo (aka Kenneth Hite) linked to holyoffice's DaVinci Code review and, well, it just goes from there.

telerib to the rescue!

Am I the only engineer on this floor who knows how to make coffee?!

Putting my finger on a loose end

Something's seemed... out of place this week. I felt like I was continually forgetting something, something I'm supposed to do regularly. I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what, but it seemed to have something to do with the Internet. I looked over my list of regularly-visited pages, but no - I'd checked everything that needed to be checked.

I finally figured it out - it's the two pages that no longer need to be checked.

Since the summer of 1999, I've been running online role-playing games. The Rabid Wombat Tavern was the first and boy, does it show. *wince* The Temple Silver was the longest-running, spanning a Yahoo! Club, a Yahoo! Group, and finally an EZBoard. Theoretically, the game is still on, but in reality? It's done. tuneinnextweek was my foray into LJ-based gaming; it didn't last too long. Neither did All That Glitters. My life's just got a lot more in it than it did in '99, and so do my friends' lives.

They're different from tabletop games. I don't do online dice-rolling for skill checks. It's more like collaborative fiction, although it's not that either - the players stick to one or two characters, for the most part, and they don't necessarily know what I'm up to. I sure as heck don't know what they're up to, most of the time.

Mostly, it was a reason to write a little something every day. Granted, there was a downside to that, too - it's not the same as writing fiction, and some of the habits and affectations I picked up as an online GM are not really good practice for a fiction writer. On the other hand, the use and abuse of points of view is so thoroughly ingrained in me now that I can consciously use viewpoint shifts as a technique. And observing how comfort zones expand and contract between the online setting and the tabletop setting has been invaluable to me as a GM.

I could start writing on my own, I suppose. But that means I have to think of everything. One of the nicest things about the online gaming was that there was a sense of anticipation for all of us, of finding out "what happens next," because you are never sure how the other parties are going to respond. Never mind the sheer pleasure of reading other people's well-written posts! I've had the good fortune to collaborate with imaginative people who are fun to read.

C'est la vie. I'm just happy to have finally figured out what the heck I was forgetting to do!