We wait too long to go from rags to riches

[sovay]

1. I slept nine hours last night. I'd slept an hour the night before. I dreamed I was at a convention where I kept being invited for academic reasons onto panels where I had nothing to contribute (I read Latin, so I was expected to explain the Crusades before the other panelists discussed the work of a nineteenth-century writer with a medievalist background) and walked out of lunch with strangers because one of them kept making offhandedly anti-Semitic comments ("Well, there's the money, but they're all right . . ."). I have no idea where any of that came from.

2. I'd spent the previous evening at ratatosk's birthday party, for which I provided two cakes: a cheesecake and a brick of chocolate. The latter was the standard variation on chocolate decadence, recipe half-doubled to accomodate more than fifteen people; it is dense and dark and exactly what it sounds like. I watched people discover they couldn't actually eat it by the slab. The former was just a small, solid cheesecake with lemon zest and oil in the filling and a chocolate chip cookie crust, but Tracy had made a specific request for cakes of colors not naturally occurring in pastry, so rushthatspeaks and I bought neon-grade food coloring from Shaw's on Friday night and on Saturday evening turned the cheesecake into this:







The brick of chocolate is served with whipped cream and puréed raspberries, so we partitioned out a third of the cream in advance and frosted the cheesecake with it. The glitter on top is just colored sugar. I regret that I have no photographs of the rest of the cream after we'd turned it electric blue and/or other people had put it on their plates, but maybe Tracy got one. I am informed the raspberries went as well on the cheesecake as on the chocolate. I feel I should say at this point that I had nothing to do with providing the dry ice that people were putting in their drinks, nor did I organize (or play, for that matter) Pin the Shadow on the Groundhog, but I approved of being at a party with both of these things happening. And then I came home and fell over.

3. I still need to write up the movies Rush and I watched the night before that. DooWee & Rice now makes lime habanero chicken bao. They are better than the wings. Also basically a legal high.

4. My poem "Delenda" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It's the poem I wrote a few nights ago. It is about loss and gods and exile; the title is as in Carthago est.

5. Readercon has a safety update.

Comments

[selidor]

That might be the most alarming culinary creation I've seen in a while. (The choc-brick, on the other hand, is sounding very tempting).

And congratulations on the sale! I like seeing how this chapbook is falling out little by little. (The shape only becomes clear by looking into the past).

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

2. The cakes look really good.

4. Congratulations!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed--that's definitely a colour not occuring in pastry nature. Despite the otherworldly colour of the cheesecake, both sound delicious.

...Pin the Shadow on the Groundhog,

I'm trying to figure out how that works. In any case, I approve of the concept.

I'm glad for your nine hours of sleep, but sorry if the dreams were disturbing as they sound.

Congratulations on the acceptance! That's a lovely poem, and I'm glad it's going to a good home.

...lime habanero chicken bao.

Sounds delicious. Wish they'd open up a branch in my vicinity.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That cheesecake looks absolutely radioactive. Surely all who ate it will get superpowers. --And that's not such a crazy proposition: neon food coloring may be as good as radioactivity at conferring superpowers.

Congratulations on the poem--I like all your poems, but that one is fresh in my mind and on a theme I like.