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 Creative commons licensed image I was doing an image search for a diabetes handout at work the other day when I came across this beauty. The photographer has quite cleverly knitted a pancreas-shaped pouch to carry all of her diabetes paraphernalia around in. Clever because:
If you or anyone you know has diabetes you might be interested in visiting Diabetes WA or have a look around for your local diabetes support group.  Creative commons licensed image Here’s a recipe I’ve converted for use in our Thermomix. I hope to make these sorts of posts ongoing, but we’ll see how I go Original Source: Super Food Ideas May 2009 Ingredients:
Method:
Number 2 son especially liked this. He fancies himself as a bit of a tea drinker. It was a bit too sweet for me, but as I understand it, Masala Chai is supposed to be sickly sweet. But you could easily halve the sugar without any problems. And just a note: I highly recommend the Super Food Ideas magazine. It’s quite inexpensive and there’s always good looking recipes in it. Another post that spent far too much time in my drafts folder. The original title was “Why did I win this year?”. Sorry ’bout that. I am speaking of course, of my finally winning at NaNoWriMo. It was my third attempt last year and I think it would be quite a stretch to call my efforts in 2006 and 2007 “attempts” at all!  Creative commons licensed image So what did I do differently? What made the difference? Here’s what I reckon (in no particular order):
Please don’t take this as a how-to-win guide, you can find plenty of those around the place. This is simply a list of some of the things that gelled for me in 2008 and helped me win! Roll on NaNo ‘09. Since November, I have finally read my novel and on reflection is what a lot less pathetic than I first thought. If there are any masochistic readers of derivative fantasy out there who would like a look, just leave a comment to that effect. OK, this is old news and not terribly interesting, but I’m posting anyway. 2008 was my first whole calendar year using iTunes as my primary music player. I’ve set up a plethora of smart playlists and the like to manage my music (I’ve got plenty of posts to come about that) but at the end of the year I decided to do my own Countdown. Unfortunately, each of the lists I made ended up being dominated by one or two albums so I’m left with not very much to say. Instead of a top 10 (with 5 being much the same), I’ll just share my most played songs of 2008:
At the end of this year when I do this, I think I’ll make a rule that only the best song from each artist makes it onto the list. It might make for a more interesting post. Sorry.
Edit 2009-05-27: I thought I should try to give credit for the above. I found it posted in a recent discussion at dragonsfoot. Now I don’t know who to blame for the “inspirational poster”, but I think that the artist responsible for the Orc Chick herself is Ursula Vernon. I couldn’t find this specific image anywhere, but Ursula has painted the same “model” on Elfwood (warning: NSFW) and I reckon they match. As per the FAQ giving permission to post images to the net, I hereby give credit to the appropriate recipient!  Creative Commons licensed image I like coffee. I like spices. The idea of mixing them together seemed quite appropriate. There is such a thing as spiced tea (Masala chai) which I have had and enjoyed, but I like coffee more and wondered how I would go about making a nice spiced coffee. At home, we tend to use the stove-top espresso maker. I find it gives a stronger brew than our home electric coffee maker and has the added advantage of making a nice big batch than you can go back to for seconds. So here’s what I did: Filled the basket up with coffee, added in a couple of cloves and a piece of cinnamon. Worked wonders! My standard batch now also includes a small amount of ginger (I keep grated ginger in my freezer so that I can use if for my ginger beer). It gives just enough kick to make things interesting. Note 1: we have black unsweetened coffee in our house. I imagine that this would still be nice even with milk or sugar, but you might perhaps need to use a bit more spice. Note 2: I’ve also tried nutmeg and star anise. The nutmeg is a bit too pungent for my liking (though in small amounts is OK) and the anise was tasty (though my wife would disagree) but it leaves the pot tasting of it for a few more batches afterward. YMMV. In hindsight, this whole idea seems to be something much more common than I had thought. For example, I found the photo here after only a minute of searching and this looks exactly like the way I make it. Perhaps I’m not as insightful as I sometimes like to think.  Yeah. Right. While tidying my sidebars recently, I updated my token adsense ad (surely an act of purest optimism to even bother). Probably because my topics here are all over the place, I can never predict the sorts of ads that might turn up. Have a look at one that I noticed today: “Novel Writing Software. Guaranteed To Have Your Novel In A Month Working Only 1 Hour a Day.” 1 hour a day? For a month? I don’t think so. It took me three goes at nanowrimo to even get a crap 50,000 word story happening. That’d want to be some super magic software. Don’t think I’ll be clicking on it. I’ve recently been involved in preparing a couple of supplements for Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game.  Creative Commons licensed image One of these is all my own work; a selection of pre-generated equipment packs designed to make the already easy character generation even easier. Check it out here: Equipment Packs: A Basic Fantasy Supplement. The second is a bundle of options for Backgrounds (that is: what your character did before adventuring) and Specialties (what your character does in addition to general class duties). These rules just give a few small changes to what your character can do. Of course, you could (and should) just write all this stuff in your character back-story but this supplement puts a few things in concrete for you. Note, 99% of the work in this supplement was done by James Roberts, I just took the stuff off the Dragonsfoot workshop forum and formatted it. The publisher (Chris Gonnerman) just decided that was enough to get my name on the credits! Get it here: Backgrounds and Specialties: A Basic Fantasy Supplement. And while you are there, check out Quick Character Generation: A Basic Fantasy Supplement by Chris Kutalik which does much of what the other two supplements do and more! |
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