My Pie

First, to set the scene: The hot fudge sauce has nothing whatsoever to do with the pie.



I had done two raised, round medieval pastry coffin pies before (and another couple of small rectangular ones, but those were in a mold). The first was perfect, the second was not.

Here's the tiebreaker. It's a pork pie. I used "Food in England" for a description of how to raise the coffin, and "In Service to our Middles," an SCA cookbook I've had for a long time, for the main recipe.

I could've left it in a little longer. I was able to move it from this pan to a plate just by picking it up and moving it, though!

Of the sauce, which was a long-cooked-down onion soup made with pork bones, basically, only a little fit into the hole. I stabbed in there to make more room, but still, not much.


To serve it, I removed the top and dished it out with a spoon and put a little of the soup/stock over it in the bowls. It's light pork meatloaf with lots of raisins.

All in One Day

Cats in Albuquerque, my brother Justin and my sister Irene who's visiting him in Texas, Holly and Adam in England, all in the past 24 hours.





It's wonderful that I can get photos like this when they're still new. The cats might still be on the couch.

Holly's Doodle-top Portraits

The video of her taking those is below, here

Gratitude, the whole set

I'm very grateful that Holly arrived safely in England and that she's asleep in a warm bed, and that she can update us via the internet.

I'm grateful that we found a set of drums for Marty and he's putting them together right now.

I'm grateful that I made it to the post office before they closed, because I got some last minute orders I maybe should've saved but figured I'd just hurry, and it worked. Six Big Books, a Moving a Puddle, and three sets of Thinking Sticks, which will travel over Thanksgiving to Vermont, Oregon, France, the U.K., British Columbia... some other places in the U.S. I can't remember. :-)

I'm grateful that the new shipment of books arrived so that I could send out those orders today. I had been down to three copies.

I'm grateful to have this blog and a camera and a computer to go with it, and friends to read it sometimes, and for it to be a place where Kirby in Austin and Holly in England can get some news of home.

I'm not going to stop being grateful just because Thanksgiving is tomorrow.
(Oh! I'm grateful that we're going to Jeff and Jennifer's for Thanksgiving!)
I'll stop reporting on this weekly, though, and report other happy things.

Week 5 * Week 4 * Week 3 * Week 2 * Week 1

Holly's departure and (Meme)mento mori (sixth of six)

Holly's plane is probably leaving the gate as I write this. Here's how she looked just before I smelled her hair and kissed her face and hugged her goodbye until January.

Frank's blog had one of these, and that leads to others. Choose the sixth picture from the sixth picture folder on your computer and post it. Here's mine: Ashlee and Marty at the zoo last winter or spring. They're still all kissy and "I love you" all the time. Mush. Sweet.

Science and other odd phenomena

Holly was looking at the projections of the sunlight through the doodle tops, and planning to take photos. Not a video, she said, but awesome photos. Perhaps in other Holly-places you can see those, but here's Holly working on great photos of doodle tops in the sunshine:



Then People Magazine came. Sexiest Man. Johnny Depp. Of course. But inside the front cover was this:


And it said "Ideas are sexy too." And then it was an advertisement for General Motors. I thought maybe I wouldn't need to scan it, because maybe there was an online version. What I found online was one blogger saying it was a good ad (having just gotten her copy of People too), and another blogger (male, I think) ranting on about how disgusting it was, and if GM had good ideas why did they take government funds and bulahh blah blaaa.

I think it's cute. I think it looks like a fusion of Mark Wahlberg, Sam Elliott and Albert Einstein. What human of any gender could complain about that!?

So then Keith came home. When he came home he was being Gunwaldt. We could tell, because he looked like this:



And he said when he was at the event today, which was a local day of arts and sciences, that he was asked a new question: "How did you get your eyebrows to match your coronet?"

Sure enough they do. Details if you click:



When he was getting ready to go early this morning he was going to wear his hair down and said he needed something on it, but didn't want to wear his big county coronet, nor a hat, so I said what about your old viscounty coronet? "The one with the sword that stabs me?" Yeah, I said. The wings.

I hadn't considered that in the very many years since he had worn that, his eyebrows had indeed done that crazy-old-guy thing of sproinging up and out. So I'm glad I have photo documentation of his eyebrows having come to match a coronet he hadn't really worn since the 1970's.

Off to the Ball

There' a masked ball at Blaiddwyn (that's the University of New Mexico, but its SCA name). Here are photos of Marty, Holly and Ashlee as they got ready and left.



Marty is a cow. He found some archeological article about Viking masks of a cow and a sheep. Neither Keith nor I had ever heard of it. What he found said the masks were fastened to close-fitting hoods, and he had this hood from when he was younger. It's felt, and he painted the knotwork on with Holly's advice and assistance. It's jowls, a nose and eyebrows.



What Marty found is halfway down this page: vikinganswerlady.com/masks