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Trifle

Posted on by Patrick

My first stop-motion video:

Mmmm, tri­fle…

Update!

Because Doug demand­ed it, here’s the recipe.

You’ll want to do this in a tri­fle bowl, a tall, wide, cylin­dri­cal bowl, usu­al­ly on a stand. I found mine at Wal-Mart for about $8.

Bot­tom lay­er: Take an angel food cake and tear it into bits. Put it into the tri­fle bowl. Cov­er with about one or two cans’ worth of man­darin seg­ments. Mix up some red Jell‑O (I use straw­ber­ry) and pour slow­ly over all. You don’t want every­thing to float to the top, which is what I find hap­pens if you pour too quick­ly. Put in the fridge till the Jell‑O sets.

Mid­dle lay­er: Mix up some Bird’s cus­tard accord­ing to the pack­age direc­tions for cus­tard dessert (not cus­tard sauce). Let it cool to about room temp (you’ll want to put plas­tic wrap on it so it does­n’t form a skin). Pour onto the Jell‑O lay­er. Refrig­er­ate till the cus­tard is cool.

Top lay­er: Whipped cream. Gar­nish with fruit (I used left-over man­darin seg­ments; my grand­ma always uses Maraschi­no cher­ries; sliced straw­ber­ries would prob­a­bly be good too).

Enjoy!

Winter Wonders

Posted on by Patrick

Hoarfrost

Sure, it looks pretty.

Frosted tree

You’ll get no argu­ment from me.

Winter Wonderland

But the night before, dri­ving down the Trans-Cana­da High­way in fog dense enough that I could­n’t see the lights of Bran­don from one kilo­me­ter away, I was­n’t think­ing of the beau­ty of hoar­frost. I was think­ing, pray­ing real­ly, “Just let us get home.”

Jewish Pastry

Also: The rugelach (or Jew­ish Pas­try) turned out just fine.

Christmas baking

Posted on by Patrick

Every year at Christ­mas, one of the fam­i­ly treats is a sweet li’l treat that we’ve always known sim­ply as “Jew­ish pas­try”. This year I decid­ed I’d like to take a crack at mak­ing it, and faced my first obsta­cle: How do you google a treat that you know by such a gener­ic (and cer­tain­ly incor­rect) name?

So I punched “jew­ish pas­try” into Google’s help­ful lit­tle box, and got how­ev­er many thou­sands of returns. Can­ny crit­ter that I am, I had a look at the image search results. Turns out the prop­er name for “Jew­ish pas­try” is rugelach.

Armed with that knowl­edge, I tried hunt­ing for rugelach in Google. And dis­cov­ered that there are as many recipes for rugelach as there are Jew­ish grand­moth­ers. Hmmm.

So I emailed my mom, and got our iter­a­tion of the recipe from her. It came from my great-aunt Olga, who is on the Ukrain­ian side of the family.

Right now the dough’s chill­ing in the fridge. Soon I’ll be dab­bing straw­ber­ry jam onto tri­an­gles of dough and rolling them up and bak­ing them. Hope­ful­ly it turns out.

Wish me luck!

New ficlet — “Jenny, who is a dog”

Posted on by Patrick

So I cre­at­ed a new ficlet this morn­ing, called “Jen­ny, who is a dog”. For those of you that haven’t run across Ficlets, here’s the idea: You go to the Ficlets web­site, sign up or sign in, and then you can cre­ate a “ficlet”. A ficlet is a short-short sto­ry, or more accu­rate­ly a part of a sto­ry. You have an upper bound of 1024 char­ac­ters* to tell your sto­ry. Any­one can add onto it by cre­at­ing sequels or pre­quels. Every sto­ry on the site is licensed using a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Share­alike license.

So here’s my lat­est snip­pet of fiction:

Jen­ny, who is a dog, came into the liv­ing room, sat down on the floor, and spoke. “What sup­per?” she said, tail thump­ing on the hardwood.

I stared at her. “Beg par­don?” I was shocked enough that I actu­al­ly respond­ed. To a dog. You see the state of mind I was in?

“Sup­per. Food. What?”

“Uh–” I’d been mak­ing my own dog food, these days. Jen­ny was old, and store-brand food was­n’t doing her any favours. “Liv­er and rice, for you,” I said. “I think piz­za for me.”

“Good. Liv­er good,” she said, and trot­ted off to the din­ing room.

I went into the kitchen and got a beer out of the fridge. As I twist­ed the cap off, my phone rang.

“Y’el­lo?”

“Doug?” It was Lisa, my girl­friend. “Uh, Doug, I did­n’t know who to call–”

“Calm down,” I said. “Deep breaths. What’s up?”

“Mr. Kit,” she said. “He’s–” She could­n’t go on.

“He’s talk­ing?” I said, and there was silence on the line. I knew I was right. Mr. Kit, who is a cat, was talk­ing too.

Jen­ny came into the kitchen and sat on the floor. “Jen­ny good dog,” she said.

And all day it kind of fes­tered in my head. I kept think­ing, what’s next? Where do we go from talk­ing pets?

So I’ve decid­ed to expand it into a short sto­ry (some­thing more like 2,000 or 3,000 words, I’m think­ing). Inter­est­ed? Let me know in the com­ments, and when it’s com­plete, I’ll email you a link to read the whole thing.

____________
* Which works out to about 200 words.

Lesson Learned

Posted on by Patrick

When you have an ear infec­tion, and can’t hear very well out of the affect­ed ear, and you tend to sleep on your side, sleep­ing with the bad ear up makes it rather hard to hear your alarm clock.

The farm

Posted on by Patrick

Just in case I nev­er get here again:

The Farm (zoomed)

I want­ed to take a picture.

This is where my grand­par­ents lived. I’ll say more lat­er, when it’s not quite so raw. The thought of not going back is enough to make the tears well up a little.

Grandpa

Posted on by Patrick

Grandpa

On the Tues­day before Hal­lowe’en, at 11:20 at night, my phone rang. Through the won­der of call dis­play, I saw that it was my sis­ter in Win­nipeg call­ing. That time of night, it’s prob­a­bly not going to be good news.

My grand­fa­ther had died at 11:00 that night. He was 88 years old, and he went, like Grand­ma in April, qui­et­ly in his sleep.

Grandpa and Grandma

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Grand­pa” →

I’m such a slacker

Posted on by Patrick

Ok, so here’s the sec­ond half of the William Gib­son Week­end sto­ry. Told as a Thurs­day Thir­teen, because that way I can kill two birds with one stone.

Signed copy
  1. That same night, there was a mul­ti-author read­ing, titled “Encoun­ters”, on the Main­stage. Six authors were on the dock­et, though one could­n’t make it.
  2. Quot­ing from the programme:

    Lawrence Hill and Lin­da Lei­th move char­ac­ters through chang­ing land­scapes. Bren­da Hasiuk, David Char­iandy, and Marie-Claire Blais [who was the no-show, IIRC] gath­er inter­sect­ing char­ac­ters in one space. William Gib­son hooks these two ends of the spec­trum and com­pli­cates it with vir­tu­al dimensions.

  3. They ran three authors, then had an inter­mis­sion, fol­lowed by the last two authors. As things were get­ting set up I saw Gib­son come in and sit in the audi­ence, over the in corner.
  4. The first three authors read from their works: Lin­da Lei­th from The Desert Lake, David Char­iandy from Soucouyant, and Bren­da Hasiuk from Where the Rocks Say Your Name. All were inter­est­ing; I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked Char­iandy and Hasiuk.
  5. At the inter­mis­sion, I went up onto the stage, and had a chat with David Char­iandy, who is per­haps my age. He’s a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at SFU (Simon Fras­er, not San Fran­cis­co). He was polite and enthu­si­as­tic. I also told Bren­da Hasiuk that I’d enjoyed her read­ing — her descrip­tion of rid­ing around a fron­tier town in a pick­up truck rung true, and I could almost feel the fab­ric of the seat­belt as she read.
  6. After this I glanced down into the audi­ence. William Gib­son was still sit­ting there in his chair, and there was still no one around him. What the hell, I thought, and went down into the row in front of him. I intro­duced myself, told him I’d always enjoyed his work — I read Count Zero when I was fif­teen or so, and it told me there was a whole new kind of sci­ence fic­tion, some­thing I’d nev­er read before. It hooked me.
  7. We had a brief chat, most­ly cen­tered on a) me try­ing not to say “Ohmy­godIlovey­our­work” over and over again and b) how Gib­son’s work has come clos­er and clos­er to the present.
  8. Con­sid­er: The Sprawl tril­o­gy was set in what I assume would be the 2080s or so, giv­en lit­tle hints in the nar­ra­tive. The Bridge tril­o­gy was prob­a­bly clos­er to about 2030 or so, if I had to guess. But his two lat­est works — Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion and Spook Coun­try are set in the present. The past, in fact: Spook Coun­try takes place in late 2006.
  9. Gib­son made the point that, real­ly, the world we live in now is at least as sci­ence-fic­tion­al as any­thing he’s come up with in his nov­els. Con­stant per­son­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty, the world-wide web and the Inter­net it over­lays: it reads, in some ways, like some­thing out of Neu­ro­mancer. Just add some hus­tlers and an unhealthy dose of street drugs.
  10. (True sto­ry: My sis­ter bought me Ting Ting Dja­he gin­ger can­dies for Christ­mas one year. They looked and tast­ed exact­ly as I’d expect­ed from their descrip­tion as Julius Deane’s can­dy of choice in Neu­ro­mancer.)
  11. Gib­son was very gra­cious, and I sure hope I did­n’t come across as a rav­ing fan­boy. He was very approach­able, and I kind of wish I’d have stayed longer, talk­ing, but I did­n’t want to wear out my wel­come. So I went back to my seat, and wait­ed for inter­mis­sion to end.
  12. McNal­ly Robin­son had a table set up, sell­ing the books from the authors that night, so when he came up to read, Gib­son just grabbed a copy of Spook Coun­try off the table. He reads in a bit of a monot­o­ne, some­thing I knew to expect from hav­ing seen him read on TV. What I was­n’t ready for, though, was his accent: soft and South­ern. After all, we may claim him as a Cana­di­an, but he was born in South Car­oli­na and grew up in Virginia.
  13. And that’s my William Gib­son story.