...is my new hobby. admittedly, i wear hobbies like most women wear handbags, but in this case if time allows it, it just might stick like that coach bag no woman can ever give up.
my first experience with non-tetrapod chordate-catching was with my dad, in my youth, using stinkbait for catfish. i do not remember much about the trip except for the stench in the minivan, catching a hook through my left index finger, and casting my very first cast into a tree on a sandbar (non-rescuable, line was cut, game was over, i was sad). i could not have been more than 10, and the shame and pain of that single failed cast has haunted me until....
well, four days ago, to be exact. that was when we boldly marched into a lodge of a west virginia campground at 8 in the morning, bought our licenses, received somewhat confused instructions on how to reach the closest bait and tackle shop, bought poles and minnows and nightcrawlers, and began our journey to angler-dom.
we didn't get to start until 9:30...admittedly late for fishing, but the most pressing issue when we began was how on earth to drive a sharp metal point through a tiny gasping fish, or how to cut a wriggling, angry nightcrawler into pieces to then be skewered on this point. we were a comical mess, using latex gloves to avoid sliminess and dropping bait and generally looking like citified fools. but then....the first cast!
after a while we were joined by a very old, adorable, west virginia couple. they had been married for 58 years, and i assume for the last 50 years the wife would talk and the husband would nod his head sagely and say, "mmmmmmmmmhm!" occasionally he would laugh, or mention that he had been stationed in texas in the war ("that's dubya dubya two," his wife chimed in) but mostly he sat back and would intone, "mmmmmmmmmmhm!"
"who's the better fisherman?"
"i am....i catch all the big ones."
"mmmmmmmhm!"
"honey, cast over there----i kin see that big black bass jes' lookin' at me. no! not over THERE----here....no, that's too far out, do it agin!"
"mmmmmmmhm!"
"i don't bait my own hooks, ya know, i don't like all them worms. i make him do it fer me."
"mmmmmmmmhm!"
"you two girls should come on down to parkersburg...you'd have fun, we've got like what, honey, 60 restaurants?"
"mmmmmmmhm!"
"well you have fun and good luck, it was nice meetin' ya'll, have a good trip!"
"mmmmmmmmhm!"
a black bass and 4 bluegills later, i'd say it was a good trip.
"mmmmmmmmmmhm!"
Friday, May 25, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Gaming, dude
i admit: i am a secret gamer.
secret because if i were to admit this...addiction (i'm feeling honest), non-gamers would scorn me and true gamers would deride me for my faux-gamer-ness. i would hang in societal limbo (despite the pope!) between the cool, normal people who don't communicate solely in acronyms and the cool, nerdy virtual people who manage to come across as casanova AND einstein simultaneously online.
no, my gaming habit brings me neither profound joy nor copious amounts of virtual women wanting to form virtual relationships. usually it is done in the morning, alone, as a sort of catharsis from all those creepy, non-cathartic dreams i had the night before. and usually the game is one that came as a free demo on my computer, FATE.
FATE's premise is idiotic, quite frankly. you are given various missions, which invariably consist of killing various monsters, and you can choose from assorted hairstyles, names, faces, and pets to make your character. well, two pets: a dog and a cat. even with my best efforts, i could not get the pet colors to change (hey, if you can change your hair color, you should be able to change fur color)....no, the cat is hopelessly ginger, and the dog benignly white and brown. this pet cannot die. it can "flee" when its life is low, which means that it runs in maddening aimless curlicues around you while you are being pummeled to death, but it is, in fact, immortal. you can "perish," but you can also pay to have your life restored. besides immortality, your pet is also endowed with a ridiculous amount of strength (it can carry a pack that's the same size as yours) and the uncanny ability to morph into bizarre creatures if it eats certain fish. oh yes, and you can fish in this game. you must have a pole, naturally, but no fishing license....you simply drop the hook, and when an exclamation point appears above your head, accompanied by a "thwuk," you have approximately 1.146267 seconds to press "set the hook." if your reflexes are just right, "you just caught a fish!" and much jubilation is allowed.
i spend a good portion of my time faux-fishing.
but i do enjoy hacking things to bits. mindlessly, of course---the great thing about FATE is that nothing looks remotely humanoid, so you needn't think. here is a list (not comprehensive, as in demo mode i cannot progress past level 3):
1) nocturne stalker: a purple tiger
2) nocturne fungus: a purple giant mushroom
3) myconid: a pink giant mushroom
4) topaz, emerald, ruby gels: giant blobs named for gems for inexplicable reasons
5) noxious gel: the toughest gel to kill; unlike the others it can poison you
6) goblin: green semi-human thing
7) goblin scout: bigger than the goblin, and blue
8) bat: a bat
9) rat: a rat. there are also sewer rats, which are bigger.
10) skeleton: a skeleton; diabolically fast and difficult to kill without magic
11) timberwolf: a timberwolf
12) gnoll: big and blue with a tail
13) bugbear: big and brown, no tail
14) kobold: imagine a rhinoceros walking upright
15) wereboar: smaller, brown, 25% fire weakness
16) tunnel crawler: a long creepy caterpillar. this one gives me nightmares
17) mottled lurker, creeping widow, tunnel spider: various spiders.
18) mummy: not to be confused with...
19) zombie: one of these is immune to basically all magic. i just let my minions finish them off so as to not confuse myself and accidentally wind up dead.
20) forest imps and imp shaman: they generally appear in groups of 3 to 4, with one imp shaman at their head that can do things to you like slow you down or electrocute you. short and green with orange hair, or in the case of the shaman, a magenta-ish color with dark purple hair.
21) basilisk: giant green lizard that breathes something that looks like purple bubbles.
so my mornings run thusly: roll to my right side and reach for the laptop on the floor, place laptop on stomach with knees propping it up. turn on computer, open FATE. pick one of three previous games i have started, or trash them and begin anew. fish. travel into the dungeon and use spells to create rat, spider, and skeleton minions (6 allowed at a time). feed my pet a fish so it turns into a "dire unicorn" or my favorite, "the brain beast" (literally, a giant brain on legs with two flapping tentacles). poke a few gels with my choice of spears, or whale on a kobold with my trusty bone club. feel immense satisfation at having slaughtered a walking rhinoceros with naught but a piece of bone. commence the day.
secret because if i were to admit this...addiction (i'm feeling honest), non-gamers would scorn me and true gamers would deride me for my faux-gamer-ness. i would hang in societal limbo (despite the pope!) between the cool, normal people who don't communicate solely in acronyms and the cool, nerdy virtual people who manage to come across as casanova AND einstein simultaneously online.
no, my gaming habit brings me neither profound joy nor copious amounts of virtual women wanting to form virtual relationships. usually it is done in the morning, alone, as a sort of catharsis from all those creepy, non-cathartic dreams i had the night before. and usually the game is one that came as a free demo on my computer, FATE.
FATE's premise is idiotic, quite frankly. you are given various missions, which invariably consist of killing various monsters, and you can choose from assorted hairstyles, names, faces, and pets to make your character. well, two pets: a dog and a cat. even with my best efforts, i could not get the pet colors to change (hey, if you can change your hair color, you should be able to change fur color)....no, the cat is hopelessly ginger, and the dog benignly white and brown. this pet cannot die. it can "flee" when its life is low, which means that it runs in maddening aimless curlicues around you while you are being pummeled to death, but it is, in fact, immortal. you can "perish," but you can also pay to have your life restored. besides immortality, your pet is also endowed with a ridiculous amount of strength (it can carry a pack that's the same size as yours) and the uncanny ability to morph into bizarre creatures if it eats certain fish. oh yes, and you can fish in this game. you must have a pole, naturally, but no fishing license....you simply drop the hook, and when an exclamation point appears above your head, accompanied by a "thwuk," you have approximately 1.146267 seconds to press "set the hook." if your reflexes are just right, "you just caught a fish!" and much jubilation is allowed.
i spend a good portion of my time faux-fishing.
but i do enjoy hacking things to bits. mindlessly, of course---the great thing about FATE is that nothing looks remotely humanoid, so you needn't think. here is a list (not comprehensive, as in demo mode i cannot progress past level 3):
1) nocturne stalker: a purple tiger
2) nocturne fungus: a purple giant mushroom
3) myconid: a pink giant mushroom
4) topaz, emerald, ruby gels: giant blobs named for gems for inexplicable reasons
5) noxious gel: the toughest gel to kill; unlike the others it can poison you
6) goblin: green semi-human thing
7) goblin scout: bigger than the goblin, and blue
8) bat: a bat
9) rat: a rat. there are also sewer rats, which are bigger.
10) skeleton: a skeleton; diabolically fast and difficult to kill without magic
11) timberwolf: a timberwolf
12) gnoll: big and blue with a tail
13) bugbear: big and brown, no tail
14) kobold: imagine a rhinoceros walking upright
15) wereboar: smaller, brown, 25% fire weakness
16) tunnel crawler: a long creepy caterpillar. this one gives me nightmares
17) mottled lurker, creeping widow, tunnel spider: various spiders.
18) mummy: not to be confused with...
19) zombie: one of these is immune to basically all magic. i just let my minions finish them off so as to not confuse myself and accidentally wind up dead.
20) forest imps and imp shaman: they generally appear in groups of 3 to 4, with one imp shaman at their head that can do things to you like slow you down or electrocute you. short and green with orange hair, or in the case of the shaman, a magenta-ish color with dark purple hair.
21) basilisk: giant green lizard that breathes something that looks like purple bubbles.
so my mornings run thusly: roll to my right side and reach for the laptop on the floor, place laptop on stomach with knees propping it up. turn on computer, open FATE. pick one of three previous games i have started, or trash them and begin anew. fish. travel into the dungeon and use spells to create rat, spider, and skeleton minions (6 allowed at a time). feed my pet a fish so it turns into a "dire unicorn" or my favorite, "the brain beast" (literally, a giant brain on legs with two flapping tentacles). poke a few gels with my choice of spears, or whale on a kobold with my trusty bone club. feel immense satisfation at having slaughtered a walking rhinoceros with naught but a piece of bone. commence the day.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Endeavors in Wine
Water? check
Sugar? check
Yeast? check
Orange and lemon? check check
Yellow blossoms of a common weed?
er, hang on a minute.
two hours later i returned home, triumphant, with 2 quarts of dandelion blossoms i had harvested from a nearby cemetery. actually, this cemetery is supposed to be quite well-known, and john d rockefeller himself is buried there. to show my respect i picked his grave clean.
peeled (only the yellow bits are useful), boiled, and steeping, the dandelions look awful, to be honest. luckily they don't smell yet, for while my roommate has been somewhat tolerant of my experiments thus far, she did wrinkle her nose in utter disdain at the cheesecloth-covered browning vat of goo on the kitchen counter. just wait until i add the yeast! one more day....
a few days ago i attended a party that consisted mostly of singers. now, classical musicians are known for their inclination to drink, and singers are known for exercising stupidity to excess. being the intellectual keyboardist i am, i glumly sat in a room filled with much nonsensical hilarity. i cannot drink alcohol (which just goes to show that dandelion wine is purely a curiosity), so i was left admiring furniture, cds, the ceiling, the dying fern in the corner, and finally the wine corks that were being mysteriously thrown in my direction.
being an incurable collector (see Papers!) i was shoving corks into my pockets until my hips looked like chipmunk cheeks (a most attractive characteristic, i must say). i brought them all home and thought, what do i do with you?
the next morning, at approximately 3 am, i awoke to my cat playing as happily amongst the corks as a toddler in a pile of raked leaves. after 30 minutes of aural torture, and a sound oddly similar to a feline choking on a slightly spongy cylindrical object, i thought, i must toss you out the window (with the feline following) or i must somehow render you immobile. i graciously opted for the latter.
so now i'm doing what i once swore i would never do: making a cork board. see, i'm not a wine connoisseur--though i read about it occasionally, being unable to taste it effectively negates whatever knowledge i acquire. opinions are useless in a vacuum. however, at the risk of appearing that i am posing as a oenophile, i am assembling a cork board out of the music school's prolific refuse simply because i cannot bear throwing anything away.
if all goes well, in one year you can come by and we'll pop open a bottle of amber, sweet, flowery wine, pour it into glasses, and place them on cork-board coasters that i store on a cork-board tray. and i can lie about all the $100 bottles of wine i have personally consumed, and you can lie about my phenomenal winemaking prowess, and we can while away a perfectly mediocre evening whilst secretly longing for that diet dr. pepper in the fridge, and for a cork collection that doesn't consist entirely of bottles $15 or less.
Sugar? check
Yeast? check
Orange and lemon? check check
Yellow blossoms of a common weed?
er, hang on a minute.
two hours later i returned home, triumphant, with 2 quarts of dandelion blossoms i had harvested from a nearby cemetery. actually, this cemetery is supposed to be quite well-known, and john d rockefeller himself is buried there. to show my respect i picked his grave clean.
peeled (only the yellow bits are useful), boiled, and steeping, the dandelions look awful, to be honest. luckily they don't smell yet, for while my roommate has been somewhat tolerant of my experiments thus far, she did wrinkle her nose in utter disdain at the cheesecloth-covered browning vat of goo on the kitchen counter. just wait until i add the yeast! one more day....
a few days ago i attended a party that consisted mostly of singers. now, classical musicians are known for their inclination to drink, and singers are known for exercising stupidity to excess. being the intellectual keyboardist i am, i glumly sat in a room filled with much nonsensical hilarity. i cannot drink alcohol (which just goes to show that dandelion wine is purely a curiosity), so i was left admiring furniture, cds, the ceiling, the dying fern in the corner, and finally the wine corks that were being mysteriously thrown in my direction.
being an incurable collector (see Papers!) i was shoving corks into my pockets until my hips looked like chipmunk cheeks (a most attractive characteristic, i must say). i brought them all home and thought, what do i do with you?
the next morning, at approximately 3 am, i awoke to my cat playing as happily amongst the corks as a toddler in a pile of raked leaves. after 30 minutes of aural torture, and a sound oddly similar to a feline choking on a slightly spongy cylindrical object, i thought, i must toss you out the window (with the feline following) or i must somehow render you immobile. i graciously opted for the latter.
so now i'm doing what i once swore i would never do: making a cork board. see, i'm not a wine connoisseur--though i read about it occasionally, being unable to taste it effectively negates whatever knowledge i acquire. opinions are useless in a vacuum. however, at the risk of appearing that i am posing as a oenophile, i am assembling a cork board out of the music school's prolific refuse simply because i cannot bear throwing anything away.
if all goes well, in one year you can come by and we'll pop open a bottle of amber, sweet, flowery wine, pour it into glasses, and place them on cork-board coasters that i store on a cork-board tray. and i can lie about all the $100 bottles of wine i have personally consumed, and you can lie about my phenomenal winemaking prowess, and we can while away a perfectly mediocre evening whilst secretly longing for that diet dr. pepper in the fridge, and for a cork collection that doesn't consist entirely of bottles $15 or less.
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