So, with the business environment being the way it is, should I retrain as insurance against the worst ?

Update [2008-12-2 4:48:8 by Phage]:Now with poll !

are about to throw out their entire government two months after voting them in.

Inspired by a viewing of the direct-to-DVD sequal to Lost Boys (the sequel being so bad, I refuse to link to it) I spent the morning banging out 1500 words (give or take)  on the theology that underlies being a victim of a vampire.

I really ought to have been writing my term paper instead.

Blather follows.

We called her Teeny (or Teenie depending on who was spelling it) because her name was Ernestine and because she was small. She was one of my grandmother's seven sisters.

Yesterday afternoon on her way home, she died.

At the same moment, my nephew continued to be missing; he'd disappeared the previous evening.

Extinction events fascinate me. Not because of future possibilities, but because I like the combination of wild theory, hair-brained idiocy, and dry non-emotional texts describing what essentially boils down to mass destruction and death. Things that should, by rights, be filled with horror, panic, and poetic questions of why are instead filled with dry, librarian quality boringness. The kind of librarian that stands there with her hair up in a bun, big thick glasses on, reading from an old musty tome, but you know whips her hair down, tosses the glasses in a corner and parties like a college coed on the weekends.

Here's the deal. You PM me with your address and the recipe for the cookies you'll be baking by this Friday. On Monday, December 8th, I will shuffle the addresses and PM you back with the handle and address of the person you should ship your cookies to.

Ship your cookies by December 19th. On the 25th, I'll post all the recipes.

Any questions?

Update [2008-12-2 9:58:49 by ObviousTroll]: You should plan on shipping about 3 dozen cookies.

Families are fun!

So, I'm lying in bed an hour ago, Welsh Girl snoring beside me. I've been alternately staring at the ceiling and fighting with one of the cats for bed space for 30 minutes. Knowing that I plan to get up at 6AM, I think to myself "If it's 5:30, I'll be alright. I hope to god it's not 3:30 in the morning." I checked the clock. It was 2:30AM. And that's why I'm up.

three days ago ni and i boiled malt, hops, spices and pumpkin together in his gigantic steel stock pot. we had decided, based on my unreasonably large horde of pumpkins to make some pumpkin beer. it had been fermenting in a large plastic bucket, and it was now time to decant the liquid off of the layer of yeast into a glass jug to let it ferment further. when we got to the bottom of the bucket there was a really thick firm layer of yeast sludge.

and so it began.

So I bottled my first batch of wine. After filling the four bottles I had, I still had about 500ml left in the secondary fermentation vessel. It didn't taste like great wine. But it did taste like wine, very reminiscent of the table wine one can buy in the states for about ten bucks for a four liter jug. I suspect that it will improve with time. I may have bottled it too soon. It was a bit bubbly. I hope the bottles don't blow their corks. Now we wait for months and, or years to see  how it turns out.

I also started a batch of mead. Looks easy. And boy does champagne yeast like honey. I started getting bubbles in less than an hour. It took the apple juice four to five hours to start bubbling. The grape juice took twice that.

Mostly unrelated blather follows.