AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

Halloween is for brains

My husband has a work party later this week provided that the Frankenstorm doesn't work itself up into more of a tizzy. He wanted brains. Specifically he wanted brains that oozed a greenish (or very green) substance.

The last time I used the brain mold was last year for homemade marzipan. Now, these molds are huge. They are meant for large ice cubes and were definitely ridiculously large for the marzipan.

I made lime curd following the recipe from Martha Stewart for Key Lime Curd. The shell is candy melts in white, pink and brown. The result is definitely an oozing liquid center.

The tops after the first batch were double layered with candy melt, because the shell was initially thin enough that the brains were easy to break. I made two batches of curd, but the rest of the brains are going to be filled with homemade red currant jam. What, you don't want bleeding brains? It is a great tradition!

I submitted this photo to Thinkgeek for their customer action shots, and decided that meant I should decorate the image with my character from Kingdom of Loathing, where I am slowly making my way to level 30 Zombie Master.I don't know if they can take a picture with that much of a reference to another game/company, but I think it was cute.

Of course, this wasn't the only brain photo my husband took and that I then doctored. Heck, Kingdom of Loathing isn't the only game I play that lately involves zombies.

Yup. Plants vs. Zombies.

I think it almost looks like the balloon zombie is about to take a bite.

Happy Halloween!

Oh, and for using candy melts or chocolate in a mold, I used Chocoley's tip page. It worked pretty well!

Just a quick one: Word Realms!

I really want this game.

I spend a lot of my non-crafting free time playing Kingdom of Loathing (don't ask how many Avatar of Boris ascensions I plan on doing), and I love word games best of all games. This is on my list to support. Boo ya!

Now, it is off to work and then a sewing class. I really need to ramp up my sewing skills. Time to suggest a class to Virginia.

It's time for Fealty

My friend, Eric, is finally getting his game published. Now, I'll admit that I'm not the best game player. For me to enjoy a game I have to 1) not crush my opposition, 2) not feel like I'm losing all the time, and 3) still feel like there was a challenge. I tend to play a lot of card and word games as a result, because I already have most of the learning curve in my bones. It is also why I enjoy Bridge so much. I certainly am not a master bridge player after all.

Eric is different. I am not sure that there isn't a game he won't play at least once and he is an awesome player and teacher of games. I don' make it to his game nights, because I haven't perfected my ability to go south of Boston, feed and walk the dog, and then go north of Boston in under 2 hours. I also haven't really perfected the life built on no sleep no matter what it might look like. I didn't get to play this game during the pre-production phase, but my husband did as one of the play testers.

Last night Chris and I broke open his copy and set the pieces up. Games are pretty short; 8 turns for a full length game took us including set up time and reading the instructions under 45 minutes. I had a bit of a problem with the learning curve. Like Othello, this game is easy to play but hard to master. Needless to say I lost! Maybe I'll cream my husband next time we play!

1. Time for scoring!, 2. Chris is playing Red, 3. What's in the box, 4. Nice box, wanna play?

Eric has a Kickstarter campaign in order to get funds to make a larger print run and cover more of the printing costs up front. If you like strategy games or territory control games, then this would be a great fit for your game library. It is nice to have a little quick pick me up game in the collection, especially if you are like us and your games include Pandemic (fairly quick), Thurn and Taxis (relatively speedy), Dungeon of Dorukan (long), and Talisman (super long).

Required warning: I'm one of Eric's friends, but I receive no $ or other tangibles for writing about the game on the blog.

awake!

I've spent the last hour playing word games and reading web comics. 

While I don't play games like the uber-popular Angry Birds, I do play a lot of short games. My top games are word games and puzzle games, making the Facebook games, Scramble and Bejeweled, the top of my play list. 

Love Word Games. I really cannot say this enough.

In real word games, here are my favorites! (A list and it isn't even 10 for Tuesday.)

1. Scrabble. I have to admit that I get kind of scary competitive with this one. My husband beat me the last time we played and I was more than a bit ticked off. Whoops. I usually score pretty high, but I have never managed to use all 7 tiles at once. My family plays anything goes as long as it doesn't use a foreign character or accent mark, which makes my polyglot tendencies pretty useful. We also use a double set of tiles. It might be simple, but quizzes is just too much fun on a triple word score.

2. Boggle. I used to have keychain boggle and I would play it on the way to work all the time until the plastic casing got so scratched up and there was too much condensation to read the tiles. I should get another one. It was a good way to spend a few minutes every day. When I lived downstairs from my friends, T&E, we would play Boggle a lot. We're fairly evenly matched, so it was always fun without being a constant blow out win for any one person.

3. Quick Word. Quick Word is like a word game for everybody. There are different categories: Blue, Green, Pink and Grey, and within those categories there are different tasks. Blue is anything associated with a certain category such as Names of Banks or Anything Found in a Sea Port. We were pretty flexible with that, because one of us (yes, I'm looking at you) is the queen of adding men/women/children and wood/glass/metal/fiberglass to everything. It's true, because they are there. Green is one item for each category matching the letter indicated by the spinner. Pink and Grey are more traditional word games like making words from a word or phrase or starting with or containing certain letters. 

4. Quiddler. This game is great for both people who have extensive vocabulary and those who don't, because it rewards you for coming up with either the longest word or the most words. It is a card-based word game, where you get a different number of cards each round and you make words using 2 or more cards. The cards have different point values based on their difficulty to use. The Q, for example, is worth more points than the QU card. This game also has a rule that we've mostly adopted for all word games of you can use a dictionary, but only when it is NOT your turn. It keeps the game moving really well.

If you have any word games to recommend, feel free to pipe up! I'd love to find a new favorite!

nano day 3: still not king

Today's Writing Prompt:
Night after night, you have these strange dreams and most of the time you forget them. Then one day they start coming true!

NaNoWriMo, like always, is teaching me truths about life that I shouldn't have forgotten. Things like:

• It is hard to do anything while the television is on (less than 100 words in an hour).  
• Writing by hand then typing almost always equals editing, and doing almost twice the work.
• Writing by hand makes your hands tired.
• Writing by hand feels more like a creative process than writing a story on the computer.
• If you are going to read a series of books, finish them before NaNoWriMo.

I should be done rereading all of the books of this series before this weekend, and our television watching tends to be a little top loaded, so hopefully I will be able to make better progress this weekend when I put food in a crockpot and alternate knitting (for fun and profit) and writing all afternoon. I hope to make it past the 1667 a day mark with extra effort on the weekends, because I don't want to do what I did the only year I won.

Let's just say that Thanksgiving should be a relaxing (mashed potatoes!) experience and not a hair pulling writing fueled craze of a holiday.

In other news: signups for games for Intercon K start today. I will need to take a break from cooking and cleaning and writing (ha!) to sign up for Interesting Times, the sequel to the singing game Tis No Deceit that I enjoyed umpety years ago!

smu-pdate

NaSmuWriMo is still going strong sort of.  I'm desperately behind, but haven't run out of story which is more important.  I have retyped the first 30 pages (handwritten and double spaced) into the file, and I'm somewhere past 46 pages written.  Of course, that means I am just about where I was supposed to be at the end of last weekend.  This week will be a lot of writing.  Tons of writing.  Days of writing.  Not exactly a surprise. 

This weekend was pretty typical for me.  Saturday was baking for the last of the celebrations for my husband's birthday.  We got together with a group of friends and went to see the Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science.  It was a lot of fun, though I am really bad with crowds.  Afterwards we went back to our place for dinner stuff and a Giant Cookie.  There were presents and the presentation of the best birthday card ever.  We played games, including Zombie Fluxx and Monty Python Fluxx.  The winning game for me though was playing a sort of Encore Light game.  A person would think of a word in a song and the other team would have to think of a song with that word in it.  There was no back and forth, but if the team couldn't think of a song with the word then they could challenge and the other person needed to sing part of the song that included the word. 

I was a bit chintzy.  I'm the only one that does a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan, so I used taradiddle.  I love that word, and they used it a lot (if both Ruddigore and Iolanthe are a lot). 

This morning I wrote smu and then alternated between writing smu and working on another chocolate peanut butter cake.  This one is the shallow Buckeye Cake from the Nestle Meal site.  I've made it before, but this time I replaced the ganache with the chocolate peanut butter ganache from last week's cake.  I'm going to bring it to work tomorrow, because it is just not safe to have that much cake sitting in my fridge.

Now it is time for loathing and maybe some more smu before bed.  It's been a tiring weekend.

scudding clouds and a wooly knit

This week I've been pretty easily distracted by life and work and the knitting has fallen by the wayside.  Mostly this is because instead of knitting I've been reading a few books, but even when I'm commuting I'd play a video game if I wasn't reading. 

I blame the blanket, but it's not the blanket's fault.  I have four projects going on: the baby set, a vest, a lacy top, and a pair of socks.  The pair of socks are mostly being ignored (they're my at home project) in favor of the baby set, which I want to finish soon (I was going to say this month, but heh.  Not going to happen).  The lacy top is my lunch time project.  Well, I skipped it for a book one day and today I worked on my commuting project instead.  Happy wool in an air conditioned building and staring at the summer sky.  Sounds good to me.

Unrelated to knitting, I've been doing Wii Fit off and on for over a month.  For the last couple of weeks that mostly means just doing the Body Test and watching it tell me I've gained or lost the same 3-4 pounds.  Obviously I'm not trying very hard.

I really should put the game back into the system and not just use the quick version (which is just the test).  Though I was trying to do a variety of exercises, I mostly was using it for the Free Step and the Penguin game and a few other things. 

(I was going to put in one of our recent kitty pictures, but really this one is just too funny not to share!)

Hopefully my upcoming weekend will be relaxing.  I'll probably work on the sock for a bit, because it is the easiest project on the needles right now and I could use a dose of easy.