"There's nothing in this house to eat!"

"I brought this for dinner," said one of the guests to our bi-weekly Sunday D&D game. "This" turned out to be a 30oz salmon fillet that he had caught himself earlier that week.

There was a moment of scrambling. Omaha and I hadn't done the weekly grocery shopping yet, for one thing. We looked at each other and wondered aloud about how we could cook it. We hadn't planned on this.

I cast about the kitchen. I thought. "There are peaches there," I said, pointing to the fruit basket. "And two Mexican zucchini." Big ones. "We have tomatoes in the back yard. Do we have any red onion?"

"There are two halves in the fridge. Somebody keeps slicing new onions without checking to see if there's already one in there."

Oops.

Dinner was salmon roasted in butter, a peach-tomato-red onion salsa topping tempered with lime juice, and broiled zucchini coins with sweated onions and Parmesan. It took all of 20 minutes to put together. I had a lovely white wine. I am the Iron Chef!

Really, D&D games shouldn't be this well-fed. Where are the Cheetos, the overdoses of soda pop, the bad pizza?

Foolscap was this past Saturday...

I had a lovely Foolscap this weekend too. Kouryou-chan and I only went for one day, but it was still a lovely day. I had a frackton of conversations about writing, programming, getting along with geek culture, even a couple of incredibly unapologetic conversations about racial politics.

Best line of the night on privilege: "I understand that some people have more keys on their keychain that I do. I don't mind that. It makes me mad when they won't acknowledge that they have more keys on their keychain."

I spent over $100 on books: Stross's Rule 34, Mieville's Embassytown, The Falling Machine (The Society of Steam, Book One) by Andrew P. Mayer (which I started reading and looks like a kick-ass superhero steampunk set in 1880s New York, with a steampunk version of Machine Man sidekicking a very able yet chronically dismissed young woman with a knack for inventing), Jim Hine's The Snow-Queen's Shadow, Cooking For Geeks, and a collection of steampunk romance short stories. (I've been reading a lot of steampunk recently, debating whether or not to make Toby and Kasserine steampunk. I think I won't, not that pair. Getting fin de siècle right is hard enough in the first place.)

Kouryou-chan tore up the place with two young ladies as accomplices, all of whom showed that headstrong leadership quality young women growing up in geekdom frequently do. They're all getting so tall. I don't feel that old!

Good times. But watch out for Haiku Sushi Buffet in Redmond. Nothing wrong with the food but for the prices they charge, you're better off going to a kaiten place like Blue C or Sushiland.

And the Borders Books next to the hotel where the convention was held was one of the saddest yet: down to a tiny corner of non-fiction and romance novels nobody will ever love.

The Horror That Came to Nackle...

The people of Nackle would have been hard for us mere humans to understand. They were crystalline beings, perfectly cube-shaped, with only minor variations. Much like humans are unique despite changes to less than three percent of their DNA, the Nackyllines were a quiet, crystalline people who went about their crystalline lives under a tiny sun in an eternally clear sky, pearlescent in the day and pitch black at night, exchanging ammoniated gasses with their neighbors and contemplating the meaning of life.

They were not prepared for that day when something, some thing appeared in their skies. The rounded, bulbous, hanging polyps of vapor, some oozing away slowly, not like a scratch or shattering wound, but sliding away in a horrific, cold imitation of melting, was enough to drive the Nackyllines who saw it mad.

That was only the introduction. A polyp of gas descended low, and a twisting, sucking sound emanated across the sky. A distended sphincter opened, and from this horrifying orifice emerged a multi-shaded spew of brown liquid that engulfed Nackyllines in their entirety. Their outer shelves, evolved only for the thin, cold air that hugged Nackle's low gravity, dissolved readily under the onslaught of thick sludge. Explosive gasses erupted from the fluid, which added only battering endnotes to the screaming Nackyllines as they were swept to their destruction.

No one remained to ask, why had this happened?

Storm cooked tacos tonight.

Storm made dinner tonight. Delicious! Now she knows how to make tacos on her own. Ground beef sautee'd with garlic and onions, cumin and chili powder. We discussed more knife skills for doing tomatoes and lettuce, and she shredded the cheese.

It's not a hard thing, tacos. But it's way better than ramen noodles, and the objective is to give her and her sister feed-yourself skills in college.