Andrew T Trembley

I'm bouncing back from the con. Yesterday was the first day I didn't crash part-way through, and it was a busy day. I also didn't hurt this morning when I got up (although I'm not without hurt, as I found turning back to look into a parking space I was waiting to get into; more of a stretch than I expected).

As for yesterday...

We did a bit of shopping, picking up stuff for our raffle Chinese Auction basket for the PenWAG fashion show. It all started with a set of 8 vintage molded glass faux-cut-crystal champagne flutes my parents sent me, and the idea of doing a '70s inspired hat box. We found a powder-blue white polka-dot tall cylindrical box at The Container Store. We found a floral-pattern Joseph Schmidt truffle assortment and a Scharffen Berger dark bar assortment at the Jos. Schmidt outlet. There's a new paper store at Santana Row, and we got some avocado green tissue paper and this great red poppies on green ground decorative paper. We're going to add a bottle of Thomas Coyne Chardonnay and a bottle of Cedar Mountain Rosé of Pinot Noir (chardonnay and rosé just scream '70s).

Then we hopped up to Berkeley to have coffee with lferion before dropping her at the Oakland airport. We discovered that our GPS maps didn't yet have the new entrance on it, so we were routed on the old detour routes, but that wasn't actually bad.

We got back home in time to load the car for the PenWAG fashion show rehearsal. There was a smidge of hotel drama at the beginning, but we got running and everybody did very well. It was a little work getting the sound up, and we're going to a different solution for the show itself on Saturday, but it was sufficient proof-of-concept and I'm not worried about it now.

So most women out there would probably be surprised by a guy remembering an anniversary celebration (I'm bad with birthdays, except for K's).

Of course, one way to ensure that an anniversary surprise is an anniversary surprise is to do it a day early. On April Fool's Day. Yes, having regular Wednesday plans was the biggest reason.

But yeah. 10 years today.

'k, so I work for the State of California. It means I get a bunch of government holidays. Some are, well, unique.

There is, for example, Admission Day, the day the Republic of California was admitted to the Union as the State of California. We don't actually get that day off anymore; the holiday time that we're required to be given by law is used to give us the Friday after Thanksgiving off instead.

Our newest unique holiday (well, about 5 years old, I think) is Cesar Chavez Day. It's on March 31st, and we get the nearest Monday or Friday when it's on a weekend. Means that we've got pretty good odds of a 3-day weekend at the end of March.

This year the odds pay out again. It's next Monday.

Merv & Judith found this (I assume) at a duty free store on the way back from England and picked up a bottle for us.

That's Jean Paul Gaultier's "Le Male".

Yeah, it's not new, but somehow it's never had much marketing in the states.

That changed a few weeks ago. We got some magazine (I can't remember which one) that had an advert.

Then we noticed the ad running during Adult Swim. This ad:

The fragrance?

Not bad, actually.

The bottle?

Cute. I love the striped sailor shirt. It's even got a little collar. There's one flaw, though. The bottle designer definitely started with his "Classique" bottle as a template, because it's still got a girl booty. Even bodybuilders don't have glutes that prominent... well, male bodybuilders at least.

...like a backed up sewer. Waiting for the plumbers to get here. At least it was today, and not one of those overtime holidays.

Got the order mix-up with Marcy Tilton sorted out satisfactorily.

Got a ride-in appointment scheduled to rebuild the seat for the K75. November 12, 7:00am in Hollister. Blah, but it needs to be done and I have that day off.

Got my health plan changed to Kaiser. It's not like I was taking advantage of the old one, and this will give me incentive to make use of it come January.

Left a voice mail with Scharffenberger to talk about the CC26 tour group in April.

Ordered a hemp fabrics swatch set from Pickering International. It comes with the price list, so we'll see if it's affordable.

Ordered the Silk Connection Swatch Set.

Ordered the free bleached linen swatch set from fabrics-store.com.

I fixed the shredder.

Or rather, I disassembled the shredder and put it back together, after which the auto-on/off started working again (and shutting off the shredder when there was no paper in it). No idea why it wasn't working. No broken wires, no stuff stuck in the beam.

It's been a busy two weeks. While some of it has been spent enjoying that we're done with Westercon 60 and BayCon 2007, it hasn't just been an orgy of relaxing and doing nothing.

Last weekend was, of course, crazy.

Saturday morning we had the monthly PenWAG meeting. The pasta salad that I made didn't turn out as well as I hoped, but it was still pretty good.

Saturday afternoon we joined johnnyeponymous, britgeekgrrl, iamradar, dinogrl, dave_gallaher, jorhett, jjustisp, squeezle and kitnboots at St. George Spirits for their "Summer Camp" party. Oy... was it a party.

They released the Basil Eau de Vie, a delightful infused brandy.

Dave was up at the still running a batch of thai-basil infused brandy. It didn't have the broad range of flavors that the orange peel did, but it was still pretty impressive. One of their sample cocktails was a "Thai Fighter" with the basil, lime juice and a bit of sugar syrup. It wasn't that great, or rather it didn't taste particularly "Thai" until we added a tiny dash of the chipotle vodka.

We were also lucky enough to get a sample of Lance Winters' latest experiment, "Christmas Tree." It's noble-fir infused vodka. It sounds really strange. It is really strange. It's also really good. It would probably sell like hotcakes in Quebec (where they drink "spruce beer").

We concluded the day with a trip to Hayward for the Alameda County Leather Corps annual contest. For the first time in 4 years it wasn't over 100 degrees. The hall was kind of warm, but nothing really bad. The show opened with a burlesque troupe (and a very good burlesque troupe at that). The contest itself was pretty uneventful; two contestants had held Santa Clara County Leather titles in the past and the third had lost last year's ACL contest, so they had some experience. Ronnie and ted_e_lthrgirl came away with the titles, and we headed home.

We did a lot of nothing on Sunday to make up for all that.

Wednesday we went to the Rainbow Chamber of Commerce BBQ at Jeff's fabulous house in the Silver Creek hills. Catering was decent, house was gorgeous, lots of fun people there.

This brings us to the past weekend.

We decided not to try to get Potter7 on Friday night. We decided to have a nice dinner at Vin Santo. After dinner we walked past Hicklebees and found Ken, Jerry and a friend getting ready to help set up the Potter Party there. Only thing is it was already set up. We hauled them back to the restaurant and had a few drinks while they waited for the party to open. Then we went home.

Saturday morning we did some shopping. We had wine to pick up, so we chased around until we found the right FedEx pick-up location (they've split Express, Ground and Home Delivery into three sites). We got some silver polyclay at D&J and checked out Hancock's Fabric for a Costume College project. The Barnes & Noble at Westgate was sold out of Potter7, but the Almaden Valley Costco wasn't. We had to stop at Costco anyway, because we needed limes for karisu_sama and didjiman's Potterthon. Costco had a bag of limes for $5; Safeway was selling limes 2/$1.

We brought chocolate and basil eau de vie (along with the makings of Basil Mojitos) to the Potterthon. We chatted and watched a lot of Potter movies. Finally, we went home and went to sleep.

BTW, if you take the basic Mojito Recipe (half a lime, mint leaves, teaspoon of sugar, 2 oz rum, muddle heavily with ice, top up with soda) and pull the mint leaves, swap the white sugar with turbinado sugar and swap the rum with basil eau de vie it's absolutely divine. I have to get a new lime-squozer, though; the acrylic one we had broke. I also need to get a good muddler; we ended up using the handle of a hammer.

Sunday was the Westercon 60 wrap-up BBQ. It was much quieter than the BayCon wrap-up BBQ. I think a lot of folks were very fried still.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading Potter7 while K cleaned the studio. I did take some time to work on a few studio bookshelves, and found stacks of old crap to get rid of. It's just a start, though. It's definitely easier to get rid of crap now.

Well...

That took more out of me than I expected.

Friday night, we did...

<MISS-BITTERS>...NOTHING!</MISS-BITTERS>

Saturday we got up, got breakfast, and then did...

<MISS-BITTERS>...NOTHING!</MISS-BITTERS>

Well, not exactly. I spent some time cleaning up the kitchen, and K did a bit of laundry and paper-trashing. All the dead food that was in the fridge is gone; there is stuff on two shelves. All the dead food that was in the freezer is gone; there is stuff on two shelves. The shelves and drawers are freshly cleaned.

We did something in the evening. We drove up to Concord to denisen1 and Jay's to fold, staple and address a few hundred Costume-Con 26 progress reports for mailing. We talked a bit, ate a bit, drank a bit of wine and folded a lot.

Sunday we got up, got lunch, and then did...

...no, not "nothing." We went to the BayCon meeting. Big chunks of it were (for our purposes) nothing, but we got some important questions answered so it wasn't a total waste of time. The total(ly fun) waste of time was brainstorming hotels with johnnyeponymous for an event not yet to be named that has <MISS-BITTERS>NOTHING!</MISS-BITTERS> to do with BayCon.

On the way back we stopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond to pick up some kitchen stuff to continue with the cleaning. We've got a new dish rack, a few new brushes, a suction-cup sponge caddy, a new cutting board and something silly for kingwyatt.

All in all, a more productive weekend than really planned.

No, really.

I have a backpack full of knives.

It's been a little over a year, so it was time to take my knives in to cooking, etc... for sharpening. The Perfect Edge guy comes by every second Wednesday, so I dropped of the knives yesterday on the way to work, and picked up freshly sharpened knives today on the way to work.

$10.80 complete for three knives. That's a pretty reasonable annual expense, and a lot better than dull knives or time wasted fiddling to sharpen a knife perfectly.

Last night (while the knives were out for sharpening) I had to go back to using the big old bone cleaver as my primary (well, only) knife. When it was the only good knife I had, it was great. Now that I've got other knives, its shortcomings for general use are a lot more obvious.

Of course, I'm also hitting the "I could use a few more knives... once the kitchen is cleaned up again" stage.

Plans for the future?

Global GF-33 forged chef's knife. The Santoku I've got is a good all-around knife for most things. I'm not sure I really need this, but it's really tempting.
Global 2-piece Japanese knife set. I'm not so sure I need this either, but I like the feel of a cleaver blade, and the vegetable cleaver is much thinner and lighter than the old bone cleaver, useful for more things. The "deba" style mini-prep knife looks like it offers a few useful options.
Global G-21 flexible boning knife. I can use the paring knife to bone out cuts of meat, but it's not the best tool.