Livin' on the edge of the law...

Here's to hoping they can't one day arrest me for those pictures of my Thomas the Tank Engine night light I posted earlier, or for quoting Gilmore Girls.

Rambling thoughts for a winter's night

When I walk home after sunset, I think I know what it's like to be a horse

or some such day-creature whose eyes alone do not reign over sight

in quite the way we fancy ours do

and who shies at shadows.

The telltale colors cloaking each form are quieter here

they require much sharper scrutiny 

than in the waking world.

I stop on the sidewalk for no reason

refuse to go on when the way is clear

because there is a strange shine on the stone

and I cannot tell if it is wet, slick, set, soft

for a moment I fear it will suck me in, pull me down

if I do not tread with care

but of course it is solid, only made of shinier stuff

than the square on which I stand.

I pause to admire the way the shadows cross

the darkest absorbing all that passes

but light darkening lighter, when they meet

neither blending with the other

all crisply informing with plain pictures

whether something lurks to the sides.

For several seconds I stop and stare

puzzling over the leaves that are not leaves

too much black and white and order

in the chaos crunching underfoot

I step carefully around the spot, unwilling to touch

unsure why, until the shapes resolve

a fallen sparrow in the fallen leaves

I try to make my silence a little more silent

out of respect for the dead.

I walk on, wanting to be home now

out of the wind, on familiar ground

not always glancing over my shoulder

when a low-flying leaf scampers by my side.

Street lights, headlights, Christmas lights 

all  are loathsome here

striking me briefly blind when I look away.

I watch a man and a white dog by the curb

suspicious, for they never move

they still don't move, so still I watch

I draw near and with one blink they are gone

or rather transformed,

boxes on boxes and three white trash bags

still unmoving and unmoved by my mistake.

Something small slithers after me

block after block, unrelenting

I turn to frighten the thing

which is the sneaking strap of the pack I carry

swung carelessly by my side

skittering along the sidewalk in my wake

I walk on.

This block smells of smoke

evil stuff, but I breathe deep to taste the ingredients

melting plastic, burning bark, smoldering leaves?

enough to make me hesitate in the haze

look and listen around just for a moment

hoping this fire is supposed to be

before making my hasty escape.

I rest a moment, blow out my breath

just to see the smoke

the kind that doesn't burn to breathe.

This block smells of apples

I do not know why this would be

have no clue which chemicals contribute 

but it is nice.

I do not linger here though

indeed, I have never walked more swiftly tonight

because I know this street

I know these trees

I know the way
I am close to home, and I have walked long enough

I forget the load I carry

and break into a trot.

Childhood Trauma

This. 

This is the face that will haunt your dreams.

Look at it

LOOK AT IT.

My mother maintains that the Thomas the Train nightlight is "cute." She thought it was "funny" when I ran screaming from the thing as a child, or when she would secretly switch it from place to place in the dark AS IF IT WERE MOVING ABOUT OF ITS OWN VOLITION.

I have tried explaining to her theories such as that of the Uncanny Valley, or pathogen avoidance, or just the flat-out fact that anthropomorphic steam engines with translucent gray "skin" and giant leering pedo-grins on their disembodied faces are EFFING CREEPY BY ALL STANDARDS, but she will have none of that.

So am I in the minority here? Is it just my imagination that this thing was bloody terrifying and still is almost two decades later? 

For the record, plugging him into the wall does not help -- his sickly face emits an unhealthy, uneven orange glow with an effect akin to that obtained by holding a large flashlight under your face. And then he's just sitting there, grinning, slowly emerging from the walls while you sleep.

Speaking of which ... 

sweet dreams.

Puzzling

Sooo ... what career option lends well to overanalysis and narrow focus? I find it's virtually impossible for me to see or hear something new without turning it around in my head and comparing it to a host of similar, different, and unrelated things until I have fit it in the proper cubby in my vast collection of similarity, differentness, and unrelatedness (they're words, they're words, shut up spell check).

Everyone does this, but I believe it's to excess with me. First time I listened to Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory: "Oh, that's interesting. The chorus has a nice feel to it. Now it's going to be stuck in my head. Hmmm-hmm- ... wait, "edge of nowhere," that's not in the song, it's edge of glory. Why am I ... oh, wait, wait, I see now, with the loud voice and the rallying and the up-down-up -- this sounds just like Song for the Lonely!"

It doesn't that much I suppose, but from then on they were interchangeable as far as being stuck in my head went.

Not long before that I was collecting Christmas music and stumbled on Sheryl Crow's rendition of All Through the Night (the lullaby, not the other one). Found myself stuck on the chorus again, couldn't figure why, was driving me batty until it clicked. "The chorus to this sounds just like We Owned the Night! It even has the same last two words, and they're both the chorus so if I compared they'd probably both show up around the 45 second mark!" (Yes, with new songs I tend to skip straight to the end of first verse/beginning of chorus to see if I like them, and I've learned over the years that that's about 45 seconds in.) In my mind this was Very Important And Significant. For what it's worth, I think the choruses start at 47 seconds and 50 seconds, respectively.

I also rattle off quotes (books, movies, TV shows, song lyrics, sayings, random things said by friends or coworkers) at a moment's notice. If I get them wrong or forget part of them (which is rather often), I'll spend up to twenty minutes searching until I find the correct version. When someone said I had to go back (to work) soon, I dug through my shelves for my copy of "The House at Pooh Corner" just to figure out what Owl had to say about "Backson" (as in, "BISY BACKSON" and "the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson").

Sometimes things go terribly awry and quotes stack upon quotes in an endless progression. "You need to press the button" becomes "You need to press the button ... button, who's got the button," which (if you've just watched a lot of Buffy recently) further transforms after a moment's recollection to "You need to press the button ... button, who's got the button ... my money's on, THE WITCH." And then people stare at you just a little bit. But that's okay, because you're psyched that you got the quote right the first time.

It can be helpful at times ... speaking of Buffy, I'll always remember how to spell Juliet Landau's name since waking up this morning and thinking, "Is it Juliet or Juliette, I'm pretty sure it's just "et," not "ette," Landau, Spandau ... HEY, it's like Spandau Ballet but backwards!"

As Lorelai Gilmore would say, "My brain is a wild jungle full of scary gibberish." I would recite the rest of the (oddly appropriate) quote here, but you've humored me long enough already and I still haven't given you any pictures. Here, thanks for waiting:

(I totally made a puzzle out of this ... /plugging website)

In which there is more of an actual recipe

Okay, welcome to part two of "learning to bake from a college student whose cupboard is full of instant noodles and oatmeal."

Now that you have your crust cooling, your cream cheese softened, and your sweet potatoes cooked nice and mushy, it's time to assemble everything. Brush the cookie crumbs out of that mixing bowl and put the peeled sweet potatoes in it. Make sure they're peeled right, with no gross bits or buds or eyes or whatever. Flecks of un-mashed potato are okay, big stringy chunks of stuff are not. Mashing them with sour cream makes things go a little smoother, and it makes the mashed parts paler than the rest so the chunks stand out and can be mercilessly pureed.

Okay, mash that stuff up and put it in a bowl, or maybe whatever you used to melt the butter in for the crust. Now dump all that cream cheese into your once-more-empty mixing bowl. If you have a real actual mixer, then by all means use that, but otherwise get ready to build some superhero arm-muscles.

If you have brown sugar, you'll want to add a bit over half a cup of that. Or, use white sugar and pour in some molasses. You can make pretty shapes if you want before you mix it all into a mush.

Add enough to make it a nice sort of silly-putty shade.

Mix it really well at this and subsequent stages, cream-cheese chunks are sort of off-putting. Now you need about three eggs; two is enough for two packages of cheese, four if they're medium and you're using three packages. 

Bystanders tensely awaiting the arrival of all the king's horses and all the kings men. Okay, now you're adding them one at a time, so if it's looking too runny at some point just don't add another one.

Once those are all mixed in and it's fluffy and lump-free, pour in whatever fall spices you want. Pretty much the same as for pumpkin, though I prefer more ginger and no allspice for sweet potatoes.

Pour all that in, whatever amounts look good.

Mix in a cup or so of sweet potato, break out the masher again if it's really lumpy.

Pour it on that crust you made a little while ago.

Have some leftover mashed potatoes while you wait, throw on a little molasses or black pepper or whatever floats your boat.

Cook it till it looks less like clam chowder and more like this.

You may want to put a pan under it, buttery crusts drip and start little mini fireworks in your oven. :)

I left mine in for about 45 minutes at 375, and the edges were getting pretty done so I went for 20 or so minutes at 300, then it sat in the oven for a while to cool off. Basically, it should be springy but not too jiggly, and a knife stuck in the middle should not come out covered in greasy soup. You can get fancy with water baths and all that, but why bother when you can just chuck it in the oven? You can even re-cook it a while at a low temp if it's not done in the middle. It's cheesecake, it's gonna be awesome no matter what. Letting it cool is the tough part, I usually make mine a day before but you can skimp on that and try a slice as soon as it's stopped feeling warm to the touch. Now you need to prepare the caramel sauce:

C'mon, you just made a whole cheesecake from scratch, did you really think I'd make you whip up a batch of caramel sauce too? Now drench that masterpiece in liquid caramel and have at it before anyone else finds out it's done.

Thanksgiving recipes? From the lizard girl?

I know, it just doesn't sound safe. Particularly since I currently have a Rubbermaid container full of live insects feasting on the scraps generated by this recipe. Don't worry, no pictures of them. Lots of other pics though, so I'll probably split this up a bit!

Well, this year I made sweet potato cheesecake with gingersnap crust and caramel sauce. I also did this last year, but now I actually know more or less how to prepare it.

So first, put on some festive baking music or something. 

Next you need take the cream cheese out to soften. I used about 2 and a half 8-oz packages -- you can use three if you have 'em, two if you don't happen to have 4 oz. left over from making crab rangoon.

If you're feeling super ambitious, you can even have them all be the same brand, but that requires planning and stuff. Next, you need a couple sweet potatoes, or one crazy big-a ... mazing sweet potato.

That's not all forced perspective with the cream cheese packages, it weighed well over a pound. You can bake it if you have time, or boil it or microwave it or whatever. Just get it cooked all the way through. Don't start mixing stuff in your mixing bowl yet though, you need that for the gingersnap crumbs. By the way, you need ~2 cups of gingersnap crumbs. More is generally better if you want the crust to go up the sides a little.

Then you need to melt 5 T or so of butter, less usually works just fine.

You're mixing food and stuff now, so tie back that unruly hair or people are gonna get grossed out thinking there might be hair in their food.

Once you've spent like half an hour taking pictures of all this, stop for a minute and think whether you're supposed to be writing a 5-page proposal essay today. If you are, take a five-minute research break.

Whew, that was exhausting. Back to the important stuff. If your gingersnaps aren't very sweet, pour some sugar in there.

Mix it up till it's all sparkly.

If it looks like there's too much butter at this stage, add more gingersnaps. If you have no capacity to plan for the future and already ate the rest of the batch, you big giant hog, just pour a little more sugar in there and hope for the best. Now you need to squish it into the cheesecake pan. You can use plastic, like this ginormous bag.

Or if it's just for family, do it the normal way.

Bake that for a while, five or six minutes maybe, till it's kind of crunchy but not burnt. Congrats, you've started the cheesecake and finished a gingersnap crust! I could have just said "make a graham cracker crust, but with gingersnaps" ... but that takes the suspense out of it. Next up is the cheesecake itself.

Beware of Squirrels

Or rather, be aware -- it's Squirrel Awareness Month, after all.

In the spirit of that (and also of needing to atone for a blog-free September), here are some squirrels and squirrely things for you to be aware of:

Squirrelface - I've discovered that if you approach while keeping the escape tree between yourself and the squirrels's field of vision, you can pop out and startle it into running right towards you. (And then you take a picture and leave them alone because it's not nice to scare squirrels).

SQUIRRELBUTT. Decided I wasn't worth staring at and went off to be squirrely somewhere else.

Squirrels of City Hall.

Squirrel prints from the dewy grass. :)

That's all for now, folks. Go notice a squirrel today!