What appears to me to be a Cooper’s Hawk seems to have taken up our neighborhood as a hunting ground.
It grabbed this squirrel one evening and a few days later I’m pretty sure I saw it snatch a mourning dove out of our tree and fly away with it. It’s so fast and quiet though. Once something happens by the time you look it’s a just a blur disappearing.
Jess’ birthday was on Saturday this year so she got the whole weekend to celebrate. Which she needed, because she felt super lousy starting in the afternoon and we postponed dinner and cake until Sunday.
Corinne created a treasure hunt for her which, naturally, led her to her presents. We got that done around lunch time before Jess crawled into bed for the rest of the day.
On Sunday we played a round of Garden Variety and a few rounds of Cat Fluxx (new games Jess got for her birthday).
We had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and then home for the salted-caramel cheesecake I’ve been trying to perfect. I realized this year that the recipe for a caramel topping I’d been using is not actually a caramel recipe (white sugar)–it’s a butterscotch recipe (brown sugar and butter). So I switched to an actual caramel recipe. Still working out how to get the caramel stiff enough so it doesn’t run off the sides. Next year, I’m planning to mix in powdered sugar once it cools to stiffen it up, which I did experimentally for the (poorly-piped) decorations. Also need to figure out how to keep the water in the water bath from getting into the springform pan and making the blondie crust soggy. But it still tastes really good.
I like apple cider, but it’s hard to find good (or even real) cider around here without driving way out to the orchards in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
So I bought a grinder and a press and built a cider station!
Building the bench took up a good chunk of Saturday–longer than I expected since it’s not exactly complicated, but I plugged along until it was done.
That made Sunday, Cider Sunday!
I bought 9.5 pounds of apples from Safeway: 50% Granny Smith, 25% Fuji, 25% Envy. I sliced them up, Corinne put them in the grinder, Heather ran the grinder. Then we loaded them into the press and out came beautiful, rich cider.
The 9.5 pounds of apples turned into 4.5 cups of cider. Less than I was expecting, but it tastes really good.
Also….not cost effective. I’ll have to pay attention to sale prices on apples. My delicious cider, ignoring equipment costs and labor, came at a cost of $6 a cup, yikes.
I did not get much of any game playing done in August.
The family played Vantage, but didn’t ended it incomplete to get to bed.
Then Heather and I played Vantage with friends and after several deaths (and running out of time) decided to call it a defeat.
We’re still really enjoying the game though. So much to explore. It’s really about the journey–not the destination, so leaving a game incomplete doesn’t seem like a waste of time. And being defeated is okay since you got to learn more about the world.
Did lots of reading but volumes two and three of the Baroque Cycle took a long time to get through.
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson
Volume two of the Baroque Cycle. The adventures continue around the world. Capers, betrayals, antics, and science.
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Volume three of the Baroque Cycle. We bring the 4300+ page story to a conclusion back in England. Isaac Newton’s mastery of the Mint is called in question after an epic heist. Our protagonist is imprisoned and led to the gallows. And alchemy brings someone back from the dead.
I enjoyed the series, but as I mentioned on volume one, I’m not sure how it would land for someone with no prior knowledge or interest in the early scientific revolution and its characters. Some knowledge of France and French helps too throughout.
An excerpt from The System of the World which I connected with from the end of Book 7 (Currency) – Chapter 8 (Westminster Palace):
Other men seemed to’ve been blessed with the ability to live in the moment, and to have experiences (Daniel imagined) in the raw vivid way that animals did. But not he. How would the ceremony, the pageantry of the Queen’s visit to Parliament look, to one who could see them thus? Colorful, magnificent, mesmerizing, Daniel supposed. He’d never know. Daniel could only see this as a sick old lady paying a call on a room full of anxious blokes who hadn’t bathed in a while.
I often feel like other people exist in a state of immersion that doesn’t exist for me. Seen most particularly in things like crowds. Many people seem to become one with a crowd (like at a sporting event) where the crowd becomes their own and whole self. Only as the crowd disperses do they regain their sense of self and individuality. I, rather, look around and wonder what’s happening to everyone and have the continual dialog running through my head wherein I see, process, and analyze the events around me but perhaps don’t experience them. At least, by outward appearances, I don’t seem to experience them in the same way as others anyway.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
And now, for something completely different. This is one of Jess’ favorite authors, so I thought I’d give it a try.
It’s written entirely in present tense which gives it a strange feeling–which goes well with the story which is about a strange circus.
There are competing magic systems at play, but unlike, say, Sanderson, we’re not giving some in-depth explanation of how they work. It’s left vague and dreamlike.
It was certainly different than anything I’ve read recently. I liked it alright.