Fresh ice-cream: utterly unlike what you buy in the stores

Two weekends ago, on a lark and with a conveniently timed and remarkably tax-deductible purchase of an ice-cream maker, I made mint-chip ice cream. The ice cream was made by slow-cooking light cream with a ton of hand-picked mint leaves in it, adding sugar afterward, and then freezing the mess in the ice cream maker. As the liquid was added, I also added "scribbles" of bulk dark chocolate freshly melted in a double boiler.

As I'm allowed all manner of illicit foods on the weekends, I'm enjoying the last of that batch tonight, and I have to say that the taste is utterly unlike anything you've ever bought in a supermarket. The mint is real mint, without many of the additional greenish flavors steamed out of commercially grown mint by megasaur-ready espresso machines. The chocolate is high-end, and shatters into tiny chips, broken and tossed about in a glorious mess, mixed not in "ribbons" but in tiny chips that dissolve on the tongue and announce themselves as impressive exclamation points scattered in paragraphs of cream and mint.

It is impossible, of course, to communicate the wonderfulness of a food through the medium of the Internet. I can only recommend that you try making this stuff yourself, because it's wonderful in ways that you'll never experience otherwise.

I will say this: after two weeks, it tastes a little more like store-bought than it did when I made it. I think the mint just fades over time, and what you get in the store is what's left after the light oils have completely sublimated out of even the best-sealed pint.

Learning How To Write Again

Thirty years ago, back when I was in High School, I wrote, like most pathetic comic book geeks, horrible X-Men Fanfic and Slash. Those words didn't even exist, but that's more or less what it was. And when you're that young and that stupid, you don't know what bad writing is. You feel confident writing any old crap, because you know where you're going. You're going to get Kurt and Hank into bed if it kills you, but you're young and stupid and immortal so it won't kill you.

Eventually, you outgrow that nonsense and begin to write your own characters, your own universe, and your own sensibilities. The stories start to be about something, and not just sex scenes for the sake of seeing the fur fly.

Two years ago, I stopped writing. I had finished the Yowler series, and was satisfied with the result at about the same time as getting laid off from Isilon, the recession was bad, bad, bad, and work was nowhere to be found. I had to make my own work. I took freelance jobs, scut jobs, even freebies to build my portfolio, and it all worked out in the end.

I'm trying to reboot Muse, but it's hard. I'm re-learning how to write from the experienced side. I know the mechanics, but no longer lack the lack of self-awareness to just write crap, knowing I can go back and fix it. I want it to be right the first time, even though I know it can't possibly be so. I stress about how "this isn't going anywhere" even as I'm learning about new characters, grown from tiny seeds of ideas and my own essential humanity rather than taken off the shelf and borrowed from central casting.

I'm up to about a thousand words a day. That's less that half of what I used to do-- I used to do a Lake a day (named after Jay Lake, a PNW writer who does indeed do 2500 words a day, every day). I figure I'll get back up to speed eventually, but it's just annoying being so out of it.

Speaking of Central Casting...

There are two truism about first impressions. The first is the one that your parents tried to impress upon you: never go by them. Whatever you think of someone's dress or mannerisms, there may be a great or lousy human being far along the spectrum from your first impression in the person you just met.

The second is that we do it anyway: that your first impression is the most important, it sets the tone and sensibility for all future transactions with the other person, and moving that gauge up or down is hard work.

Omaha and I were at Kouryou-chan's school for the monthly garden party. We were there at 10:00am, and parents started to trickle in for the next fifteen minutes. We supplied coffee and muffins, divvied up the work, and set to it.

At 11:00am, a car pulled up. A man and a woman got out of the car, and she did not look like she was dressed to get her hands dirty. "Hi," I said. "I'm Elf. You here for the party?"

The woman stared off into the distance, not really taking in any of the details. The man said, "Elf? I'm Doug. Yes, we are. What are we doing today?" I was taken aback. His manner wasn't arrogant, just very loud and foreward. He wore an earbug in his right ear, his smile was as bright and shiny as Bender's ass, and his voice was the kind last heard from Joe Isuzu. He had that amazingly firm and practiced handshake you get only from glad-handing as a career. Seriously, if you called up Central Casting and said you wanted an Asshole Salesman, this is the guy you'd get.

His wife barely twitched as he spoke. She was a small woman of Pacific Island descent, I'd guess, wearing a cotton white dress and pearls. Not clothes for getting dirty.

Okay, I told myself, calm down. He's not from Central Casting. I described to him the tasks on today's assignment, weeding, planting, cleaning gutters, picking up trash from the back parking lot. He never changed expression either, just held his rock-solid look of feigned interest. I said, "We started about an hour ago, and there's still plenty to do. Need some hours, eh? If you stay to the end, the two of you can put six hours on your tab."

"Is there one in May?"

"There should be. There's one every month. The hours cycle starts in the summer, so May will be the last one."

"Well, we have other things to do. I have money to put in the bank and, you understand. We'll come to the May one, won't we honey?"

"Mm," his wife said, nodding briefly, never turning her eyes away from a middle distance that seemed to see nothing at all.

"Yes," he continued, "We have other things to do today. Well, nice to meet you, Elf." And off he went.

Wow, even the second impression was terrible.