Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

I cooked a turkey. It was tasty. Nobody died. I'm still in shock.

In other news, in other places, rowangolightly is coordinating an auction of goods and services to benefit apocalypticbob, who has recently had a run of bad luck, including the expensive car-fail kind. You can find it here.

There's lots of good stuff up for bid here, including that I WILL BAKE YOU COOKIES. You know you want some of that. Go click.

I can tell we had a successful party yesterday, because there are a great many things in my house that are not mine. I can tell we had a low-drama party, because none of them are pants, and the one of them that is a vodka bottle is still 3/4 full.

The kitchen is a war zone. I am afraid to look in the fridge. What lurks within? I know not, but that it may involve turkey. If it does, we're having gumbo tomorrow.

I missed the end of the party, alas. I believe that someday I will learn that my body in its current configuration can process either a good deal more sugar than usual *or* a great deal more wine than usual, but not both. I crashed at some point, and delighted in the fact that when the party's at my house, I can go to bed whenever I like. I woke up around 4:30 a.m., was grievously ill, then went back to bed. I'm pretty sure everyone who doesn't live here was gone by then, but I didn't investigate the couch too thoroughly.

Anyway, I live on. And so does everyone else who was cooking with me in my kitchen yesterday. I am sometimes protective of my space in the kitchen, and I have easy access to large knives, so I felt going into the situation that survival might be a near thing for some of us. Fortunately, though, once everyone had all their proper equipment sorted out, the cooking was pretty painless. I am grateful to ruisseau and triadruid, who were lovely sous-chefs. ruisseau gets the "Beyond the Call of Duty" award for stemming and peeling mushrooms, which she dislikes profoundly. popefelix is a very gadget-y, by-the-book cook, which is exactly the sort of cook I am not, but still, peaceful kitchen coexistence was achieved, and the turkey was Yummy.

So, today, when triadruid rolls out of bed, I think we're gonna head out to Larrytown to put up some posters for Longest Night, and perhaps catch some yummy non-turkey dining. Later, Friday Night Supper Club is on at Blue Nile at the River Market (aggressively non-turkey dining, that). I hope to manage to sneak in a birthday present for the boy, who doesn't want a birthday party and so on and suchlike. I respect people's rights to not have a party, but it is very hard for me to consider not buying a present, for the gods' sakes. We'll see how it goes. Until next time, dear readers. :)

This weekend kicked a lot of ass. Some of it was mine. *grin*
( How I spent my Summer Vacation... er... Weekend. )

Also, somewhere in there, I had the first root beer float I've had in over a year. Somewhere in there, I spent a lot of time in bed, mostly with company. Somewhere in there, I cooked a meal and made oatmeal cookies. I'm liking this weekend-with-few-commitments thing. I'm going to try to do some more of it. Like next weekend, maybe.

I need a website that allows you to put in an address anywhere in the U.S. and then returns a list of restaurants that would deliver to that address.

Pizza Hut is so, so fired.

Yesterday, I learned how to make blackened fish. I'm *this much* closer to being totally self-sufficient. *G* (Or at least, I can strike one more thing off the list of things I have to pay someone else to do for me.) It was damned tasty, too.

In other food news, I'm 2/5 on my 101 in 1001 goal of trying new restaurants in Kansas City. ( Reviews below the cut - Boudreaux's and HuHot )

Dragged out to see Sweeney Todd last night with adammaker, and had an effing blast. jackbabalon23 called the film 120 minutes of Sondheim and Gomorrah, which is accurate, and I can't come up with a better descriptor than that, so I'm stealing his. I promised orcjohn I'd tell him how the film was, so here I am, telling him how the film was: It was mostly brilliant, and extremely funny. We laughed at all the wrong parts, which are, of course, all the right parts. There's a bit in the beginning where they do a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride style shot, moving through London, narrowly avoiding any number of disastrous collisions, and it's just about worth the price of admission by itself.

I was a little worried about whether or not Johnny Depp could, you know, sing at all, but I hear he had lessons, and he acquitted himself reasonably well. Well enough for Sondheim, anyway, and where he falters, it's just as much a product of Todd's accent as anything else. Sacha Baron Cohen is a wildly funny Pirelli (again, quality of singing not so important for the role -- it's comedy, for the gods' sake). Toby is, for some reason, about 8 years old, which is a better fit in some ways than the sort of 14-16 that I think you usually get, although it did make the end much creepier than it might have been. The boy playing Toby is perhaps the best vocalist of the film, although the boy playing Anthony is a close second. Also, the boy playing Anthony is extremely pretty, and I enjoy seeing extremely pretty boys getting roughed up a bit. I consider this to be a failing in my character, and I'm sure you will too, unless you're a pretty boy who likes to be roughed up a bit, in which case you should talk to me after the show. ANYWAY.... Helena Bonham Carter is superb, but I wasn't expecting any less. The clash between her single-minded motivation and Depp's single-minded motivation is brilliantly played in facial expression and inflection, so that was a lot of fun to watch. It doesn't hurt that she has a lovely voice, and two of my favorite songs in the show. Rickman, we don't get enough of, which was the one noticeable failure of this production. Turpin's creepy behavior towards Joanna is limited to spying and the harassment necessary to move the story along; you don't get to see much of his internal struggle or his wretched proposal to her, which are some of his best bits, in my opinion. Alan Rickman, not creepy enough. Oh, well. Joanna, meh. She has almost no character to begin with, and a lot of the little she had got cut from the film. This is just as well, as I had no desire to hear her sing any more often than was strictly necessary, and she looks just enough like a grey alien to be unnerving. ANYWAY AGAIN... Overall, two thumbs up (one severed and in a pie).

Following the show, we went to Hooters (no respecter of holy days, Hooters) and had some solid food that almost certainly wasn't people. adammaker regaled us with alchemical research and meat pie recipes. At one point, kittenpants left the restaurant to take a phone call, and got locked out. Comical hijinks ensued. Also, we discovered that we'd apparently all slept with adammaker, at least according to popular theory. It's nice of people to tell me these things, because I'm almost never aware of them. I'd hope that if I slept with adammaker, I'd at least remember it, because it seems like it would be fun. FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ANYWAY...

So that was my Christmas day, how was yours?

It's like being clergy or something. Anyway, I'm looking for some help, and here's the deal.

From now until Imbolc (that's 2/2, for you mainstream religious types), Gaia Community is collecting money for Heifer International. Heifer is a charitable organization that gives livestock to poor families to help feed their families and their communities, and have milk, eggs, honey, wool, and suchlike for trade. We're trying to raise enough money to sponsor a flock of sheep for Imbolc, in honor of Brigid.

Wanna help out? You can drop by my donation page and make a donation, or you can join Gaia Community's team and canvass your friends, family, coworkers, whoever, for help. Or, of course, you could just go to Heifer's website and donate there, but I'm trying to make our team look good here! :)

Thanks for reading, thanks for donating. Now, I'm gonna go see orcjohn up at the hospital. Catch you later.

kittenpants was away at dance camp (this one time, at dance camp??) for the weekend, so triadruid and I consoled ourselves by playing D&D, going to the movies, eating stuff she doesn't like, shopping, and generally fucking around. And it was good!

The D&D group met on Friday, and finished Chapter 1 of their great adventure. Next time, they'll meet their new traveling companions (mwa ha ha) and head outside the boundaries of the Vitraen Empire to aid some of the Empire's allies. That means triadruid and I get to build a bunch of encounters that are much weirder than anything we've done so far, and we'll also be building the town of Freeport, which is controlled by a coalition that includes (among other interests) religious leaders, the military, and the mafia. Good times. I'm thinking that I'd like to build an LJ-filter for the campaign that will not include any of the players, and post some of the world-building and character-building stuff on it. For one thing, we've been writing little micro-fics about the PC's lives before the game, and handing them out to the players, and I'm pretty proud of some of the writing. I want people to appreciate our twisted genius, you know?

Saturday, we went shopping with the goal of buying triadruid some pants. This failed, but he did find a nice belt, and I picked up some pirate pajamas (size medium -- who knew?) and a nice red and grey wrap (I'm officially an old woman now, I've bought my first shawl). We also saw Shoot 'Em Up, which was simultaneously hilariously funny, wildly stupid, and amazingly well-choreographed. It also somehow managed to have a gun-control message mixed up in its hash of plot, which was like an extra layer of funny. Clive Owen was deadpan and bad ass, Paul Giamatti was creepy and pussy-whipped, and Monica Belluci was somehow creepy and warm-fuzzy at the same time, so that was all good.

Somewhere during the course of the weekend, I remembered that I can cook if I have to. I made fried catfish on Saturday, with these wildly interesting zucchini 'fries', and then on Sunday made chicken in a vinegar and herb pan sauce with crimini mushrooms, and served the rest of the zucchini (I always overbuy zucchini, for no good reason) in an Alfredo sauce. All of it was surprisingly tasty.

The rest of the weekend would more or less have to go on my TMI filter, if I had one. But I don't. :) Let's just say I'm extremely tired this morning.

Unfortunately, all the weekend goodness was marred by logging on to LJ last night and discovering that Robert Jordan had died, and that some folks that I thought were doing really quite well were actually not doing so well. Ah, life. But the story goes on, in both cases. Mr. Jordan allegedly had told the end of the Wheel of Time series to his wife and other family members, who were sworn to finish the project should he be unable to do so. So that continues (thank the gods - I've only been reading those things for ten years now, and the end is so, so close!). And for the rest of us, as long as we live the story's not over either. Somebody quoted something at me the other week which I find terribly appropriate, even though I can't remember who originally said it now (and I'm paraphrasing anyway) -- "Everything always turns out all right in the end, and if it's not all right, it's not the end." So I'm sending that kind of energy out to everybody today. If it's not all right, it's not the end.

Have a fine sort of Monday, everybody. :)