I know there was something I wanted to post about, but my brain seems to be in a fog and I have no idea what it was. Oh well. I can at least link to the new site stuff.

First, the reviews. There’s yummy stuff in The Superfood Cookbook—how can you resist a combination of delicious, easy, quick, and nutritious??

I’ve also posted reviews of Mathias Freese’s enchanting Down to a Sunless Sea and Robert Cutler’s The Secret Scroll. In case you ever wondered whether all those high-scoring reviews indicated that I was too easy on review copies, worry no more—I don’t pan books very often, but that latter one made me want to tear my hair out.

Next, two more T-shirt designs. There’s a bit of relationship humor called going unsteady and a shirt for the Gnomish Air Force:

If I remember what I was going to say, I’ll just post again later!

Many of the friends we’ve made in the last couple of years are in the SCA: the Society for Creative Anachronism, and have been for decades (literally). They aren’t as active as they used to be, but they definitely still participate. We visit a friend’s house for fighter practice in Virginia nearly every weekend (at least, on those weekends that we don’t go to the same house for D&D).

Anyway, I’m still pretty new at the photography thing, but I did take a few photographs to share. The guy in the plain white tabard is my husband; he’s borrowing a shield at the moment, so that isn’t his device. The knight in green and gold is Jervis, who comes up with so many of the slogans on those T-shirts we love to make. The fellow in red-and-tan (not in armor) is Cian (his SCA name), another friend. And I couldn’t resist including a photo of the pouring rain we encountered on the ride down—it was so bad we kept passing car wreck after car wreck. Here’s hoping all those folks got out alive.

Anyway, here’s a slide show of those photos:

I also included a slide show in today’s book review, the first of our cookbook reviews with images of some of the foods we made: Erik Sherman’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pizza & Panini. Also, last week I reviewed Julie Leto’s Phantom Pleasures.

Okay, I didn’t get a review written yesterday. But I have two books read & ready to be reviewed for this coming week (one fiction, one non-), and a cookbook almost ready (cooked from, but I need to read more of it). Speaking of cookbooks, this week we’re cooking from Food 2.0, the cookbook from the chef who cooked at Google for years. Our first experiment from it—a smoothie—was awesome. In order to get everything we needed we made a rare pilgrimage to the Whole Foods Market. Usually the prices there are insane; however, the prices there don’t seem to be rising as fast as elsewhere in response to the higher gas prices, so it no longer seems quite so ridiculous to shop there now and then.

We went to see a movie today (Ruins? The Ruins? Whichever). It was definitely fun, if not overly new or different, and it had some nice touches to it. Mostly it made me curious to read the book, which at this rate will happen on the fifth of never. Sadly, the movie popcorn was so bad it made us mildly ill. I’m used to cruddy movie popcorn, but this went above and beyond. Blech.

I felt like doing something semi-productive this evening, so here are two more re-worked MMORPG T-shirt designs:

It’s our “Murlocs of War” and “Gnomes for Breakfast” designs (’Cry havoc! and let slip the murlocs of war’; ‘Gnomes they’re not just for breakfast any more, they’re also for between-meal snacks’).

Hopefully tomorrow I can get a little gardening done around chores, cooking, reading of review books, etc. Hope you’re all having a good weekend!

I’m buried in books. I had a friend visiting over the last week and took a semi-vacation at the same time. She saw how many review books I have at the moment, and when I emailed her this morning and told her my husband had discovered four more on the doorstep when he left for work, she replied:

“woman killed in her own home by book avalanche. film at 11.”

Don’t worry, I can catch up. (I sound so confident, don’t I?) Today’s review is of J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s Immortal in Death. I expect to have another ready to review tomorrow, and we’re cooking from two review cookbooks right now. Speaking of cookbooks, I’ve found that few book bloggers tackle them. But this morning I discovered one that does! Visit the Thin Red Line when you get a chance.

In the meantime, here are two more re-worked designs from Gamers’ Heaven:

Yesterday I got two fillings for the first time in 20 years. Plus side: dental work has improved a whole lot in the last 20 years. It took very little time, and the only pain was from the injection.

Minus side: there’s just no way to eliminate an entire childhood of accumulated terror regarding the dentist’s chair. Every time I feel the drill bite down I expect pain. A lot of pain. I think I shook during the entire time I was in that office. And really, I feel badly for the dentist on that score, because he’s a nice guy who does a good job, and it’s gotta be tough to know your clients are scared witless.

My visiting friend and I are making a couple more recipes out of the chocolate chip cookbook. Surprisingly for a Chronicle cookbook, there appear to be some… problems… in this one. There were multiple things in the cheesecake bar-cookie recipe that left us scratching our heads in confusion; I’ll give you more detail in the inevitable review. I’m looking forward to getting a digital camera at the end of next month; this is the sort of thing where I’d love to be able to post pictures of the ways in which a recipe clearly isn’t coming out as it should. Next we’re making a berry-chip cake, and some ‘make-ahead mashed potatoes’ to bring to a friend’s house this weekend.

Then maybe I’ll indulge in some World of Warcraft; I’m rather enjoying all the new content from the latest patch!

Today’s review is a sneak peek at Christie Ridgway’s How to Knit a Wild Bikini.

Good lord, it’s my first cavity in… uh… 20 years? 25? I went to the dentist today and found out I’ll need to get a tooth drilled at the beginning of next month. *sigh* When I used to go to the dentist it was a very painful experience, and even though I know intellectually that dentistry is better now, I’m still terrified of dental procedures.

Anyway, you can expect a review of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerilla Marketing tomorrow. I’m now reading an advance copy of The Trouble with Moonlight, and cooking from two cookbooks (one for desserts, one for other). So far neither of the cookbooks is giving a stellar performance, but we’ll see. One has recipes that come out well so far, but the notes have blatant errors in them. The other looks flawless, but the very first recipe we tried produced some unexpected difficulties. At any rate, I promise plenty of details in the reviews!

I had about five or six things I was thinking of writing about today, but I’m drawing a near-blank. You’d think I hadn’t had my cup of coffee this morning yet. Okay, one at a time, let’s see how many I can remember:

Book reviews: Today’s review is of John Izzo’s The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. I know it sounds gimmicky, but it’s actually a very good book.

I have three cookbook reviews upcoming soon: a Betty Crocker whole grains cookbook from Wiley; an EatingWell Healthy in a Hurry cookbook; and a New England cookery cookbook. I’ve also gotten four new cookbooks for review; two are filled with decadent desserts; one involves coffee drinks & desserts; and one focuses on olives and olive oil. I’m nearly done reading Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good Food as well.

Sayonara, Rite Aid: Imagine for a moment that you’re getting a prescription filled. It’s a medication that you have to take three pills of every day. Your doctor deliberately gives you a scrip for the time-release version so you only have to take it once a day, all three pills at once, so, for example, you won’t forget to take it at lunch. It’s a psychoactive mood stabilizer prescribed for bipolar, so it’s something you can’t mess around with in terms of blood level. You get the prescription filled. Thankfully you’ve been taking the medication for a couple of years already, so when you open the bottle up a couple of days later you know damn well your pills shouldn’t be bright pink.

Turns out they gave you the non-time-release version—without changing your instructions to take it once a day.

Imagine what could have happened if you had never taken the drug before and didn’t know any better, if you’d actually taken all three pills at once. Spike in blood level, possible toxicity effects… at best, without a consistent blood level it certainly wouldn’t have kept your moods stable.

Yes, human error exists at pharmacies. They can miss the very large ‘XR’ that indicates extended release (a later check of the carbon copy proved it had been on there). But any halfway-awake pharmacist should have realized that the direction to take three pills in the morning, combined with that drug, could be bad.

I was willing to deal with the apathetic pharmacists and ridiculously long wait times at our local Rite Aid because it was so close to home. I’m not willing to deal with careless mistakes that could truly screw me up. I’m now a happy customer of a different pharmacy, which is an extra 15 minute drive away, but had noticeably awake pharmacists and techs, a much shorter wait, and much nicer facilities.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: I love the game’s economy system more than that in any other game I’ve ever played. However, in order to really go nuts with it, you pretty much need a society (guild-equivalent) to work together. Each player is allotted ten plots of land (essentially) per server that they can put into use. On each plot of land you can build some sort of structure, like a plantation (which allows you to combine stored hours of labor plus money to harvest, for example, beans, maize, wheat, or hemp), a grain mill, a textile mill, a weaponsmith, a tanner, a hunting lodge, etc. The devs deliberately made these things fine-grained enough that you need more than ten buildings to really make anything useful.

One of my complaints in games like Warcraft is that ultimately, crafting isn’t entirely useful. There’s an end-state characters reach where there just isn’t much more you can craft that’s useful. Pirates put that to shame—there’s so much to build that’s constantly useful. Ships, ship modifications, ammo, consumable repair kits, buffs, etc. (special gunpowder, hull patches, and so on). With a good society you could really go to town playing with the economy and the pvp mechanics.

Unfortunately, everyone I know has already invested years into their Warcraft characters. Putting all that stuff together in Pirates would take a lot of time that they just don’t have. Nearly all the gamers I play with are adults, with jobs, spouses, kids. They don’t have time to do that and Warcraft, and since we already have our WoW guild kitted out and having fun, with its level 70 characters, the odds of them pulling up roots and settling down in Pirates—no matter how good it is—are virtually nil.

So as much as I’d like to play Pirates and enjoy the game, for the moment I’m not buying it. Perhaps later, if we can convince even a couple of friends to go with us, we’ll do it. But for now, it looks like we’re sticking with Warcraft.

EVE Online: Eve, on the other hand, is easier to get a satisfying experience out of without that active a corp behind you—simply because there are no levels, and thus it’s incredibly open-ended. There’s no worry that you’ll hit the top level in two months and say, “now what?”

I got my first Myrmidon and lost it again almost immediately in my first level three mission. I know, that’s incredibly pathetic. I blame the fact that I hadn’t had my coffee yet, because it’s a convenient excuse. (Actually, had my reflexes been slightly better I wouldn’t have lost my Myrmidon—I hit warp just a fraction of a second too late.) I went back with my tail between my legs, refused to drop the mission, spent a few days replacing my Myrmidon, kitting it out better, and building up shield skills, and went back and succeeded at the mission. Phew.

Okay, I don’t know if that was all I meant to talk about today, but it’s certainly enough for now. I’ll leave you with a bumper sticker that beautifully reflects my political feelings:

I vote for people not parties

I’m out of coffee! Somehow I missed the fact that I didn’t have any more in the cupboard. *sob* No coffee today.

Well, at least I got another review written: Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey. Excellent bread!

I think I’m going to save my review of Bettie Sharpe’s super-awesome Ember until the 15th, so I can link to her new book when it gets released. She’s an incredibly good new author, and I think incredibly good new authors deserve all the exposure they can get.

We’re still going strong with the recipes from the artisan baking book. We have a batch of pumpernickel dough in the fridge now that’ll yield fresh home-baked bread for the next handful of days. I noticed at Amazon that there was a baker who was very snippy about the whole notion of this different way of making bread. What made me shake my head, though, was that some of his complaints weren’t even particularly valid. He said the title’s ‘5 minutes a day’ was misleading because of things like rise time, but the book is extremely explicit about the fact that it’s referring to time during which you’re actually working with the recipe, not time during which you can be doing other things. He also said that because it’s a wet dough people would find it difficult to shape into anything other than a round boule loaf, yet I’ve found it just as easy to make dinner rolls and baguettes with it. I can’t help thinking this is either a bit of traditionalist bitterness (it’s different/easier so it can’t possibly be good), or a smidge of feeling threatened that folks might not need to pay $5-10 for a fancy loaf of bread at the bakery if they can make it themselves so easily. In particular I have to think this is the case because all of the other people who’ve used the book—myself included—have had delicious results with it. To which a feast of almost 20 people from last weekend can attest.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday is all about anticipation:

What new books are you looking forward to most in 2008? Something new being published this year? Something you got as a gift for the holidays? Anything in particular that you’re planning to read in 2008 that you’re looking forward to? A classic, or maybe a best-seller from 2007 that you’re waiting to appear in paperback?

Oddly, the two books I’m looking forward to the most are the ones I get to use this week. My husband and I are going to a Twelfth Night feast this weekend at a friend’s, and we were asked if we’d be willing to make bread for 25 people. Willing? We’re psyched! As it so happens—and this is a total concidence—I just got review copies of two very appropriate cookbooks. One is A Baker’s Odyssey, a book of traditional bread recipes from around the world. The other is Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. So we get to make a bunch of really great breads that we’ve never made before, share them with wonderful people, and test out two review cookbooks! It doesn’t get much better than that.

Speaking of cookbooks, I have two new book reviews up: Wild Game Cookery and Make-a-Mix. More to come—particularly those bread books!

I missed last week’s BTT, so this time I’m doing two weeks in one!

This week:

Do you use any of the online book-cataloguing sites, like Library Thing or Shelfari? Why or why not? (Or . . . do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin))

If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything?

I’ve tried to use cataloging software once or twice, but a couple of things prevent me from actually making it work. I lack enough shelves for my books, making it impossible to dig them all up/keep track of them all, so inputting the massive amount of current ones would be prohibitive. To make it an even halfway reasonable task I’d need a barcode scanner and more bookshelves.

However, that wouldn’t make up for the fact that I’m scatterbrained and forgetful, which means that I’d soon start forgetting to input new books, and then the catalog wouldn’t be at all accurate, and I’d give up.

Last week:

This week’s question is suggested by Island Editions:

Do you have a favourite book, now out of print, that you would like to see become available again? (I have several…)

Absolutely. I mourn the fact that Word Painting apparently went out of… hey wait a minute. It’s back in print!

WOOHOO! No more telling people they should track down a used copy!

Ahem. Okay. The second-most-often mourned out-of-print book in this household would be Janice Henderson’s White Chocolate cookbook.

While I’m posting, time to update on reviews. I’ve posted my third annual gift recommendations for cooks (mostly awesome cookbooks), and a review of the Baker’s Edge Pan.