Mushy Bread and Oatmeal Cookies

I slept in today with joy in my heart. I stumbled out of bed around eleven AM and ordered in some Tim Hortons for breakfast/brunch. I watched an episode of ‘Trigger Point’ while we waited for the food.

While we ate our food and watched an episode of Bill Maher. There was a lot of talk about Iran and Trump going off the rails. Nothing new there.

Afterwards, Robyn wanted to read, so I watched another episode of Trigger Point since she wasn’t into it that much.

We made plans to have our friends, Paul and Laura, over for tea. They arrived around two PM and brought oatmeal and raisin cookies to go with the tea. We chatted about movies and tv. Then we moved on to the state of the animation industry. Laura is a production manager, and the challenge these days is finding work. Many of the job offerings for animation are “Ghost” posts. They are up for twenty-four hours and then disappear. If you go to the company’s website, it shows as not having any job postings. Which is incredibly frustrating for anyone who is desperately seeking employment.

And it's cruel as well.

We chatted until about five-thirty, and then Robyn went to do her painting-a-day before having to pick up the kiddo from work and go for a walk. I attempted to make some malt bread, but the oven is acting up. It doesn’t keep temperature in the baking mode. I switched it to convection bake, and that seemed to work fine. Unfortunately, the bread was baked for fifty minutes at a temperature unknown to me. I got the oven back up to three hundred and fifty degrees and baked it for another thirty minutes. I left it in the bread canister to continue to cook. Not sure if the bread will turn out or what’s wrong with the oven. I hope we don’t have to buy a new one, because that is out of our budget at the moment.

Later in the evening I would return and remove it from the canister to find it was moist. Probably left in there too long, but I’ll leave it on the counter on a rack to air dry a bit. It should be fine for making toast. I’ll know better when I cut into it in the morning to see if the center of the bread was cooked all the way through.

After fussing around with the oven, I pumped up the tires on my GoTrax GX3 scooter and took it out for a spin. It was dark out, but the scooter had plenty of lighting. The ground was still a bit slick, and in some areas, there was still ice and snow on the ground, which was surprising because the temperature went as high as eighteen degrees Celsius.

Going outside felt weird today because the cold, biting air was missing. It has been months since we could walk outside and not feel the icy chill of winter. It’s supposed to be in the teens all week, so I imagine all the snow will be gone by the end of the day tomorrow.

And if I am being honest, I am completely ready for some warmer weather. I am very excited to get back in the garden and get it a little nicer looking this year. I say that every year, of course. I miss having my morning tea or coffee as i do my inspection of the garden. It’s a great way to start the day and end it.

I can see now that the snow is melting that I have a few fence boards to replace on the vertical deck shades. They need a little repair most years, so nothing surprising.

The squirrels have chewed off another bulb from our hanging lights and left t lying on the ground. This is the third bulb they have amputated, and I am not sure why they do this. They don’t take away the bulb or the wire.

It must be some sort of squirrel entertainment.

And speaking of entertainment, or the lack thereof, Giantfreakingrobot.com is reporting that there are no Star Trek shows in production, the first time in over a decade. Even their newest attempt at a Star Trek show, ‘Starfleet Academy’, which was green-lit for a season two, has no season three, at least so far. And with all the studio mergers going on, it doesn’t make sense to make any new offerings to the Star Trek fandom when it is likely to get cancelled by new or incoming management.

So, it’s likely there won’t be any Star Trek sci fi for the foreseeable future. I think that is a good thing. There are so many other properties that could be developed in this genre. Books, short stories, and comics that are ripe for the visual medium. And I predict that is whatis going to happen. We will start to see new series based on well-loved books. I think Brandon Sanderson’s Misborn or maybe it was the Cosmere are getting television treatments by Apple TV.

And if you are the other networks, you have to be watching what Apple has accomplished and asking yourself if you should just copy their approach. Most of Apple’s shows are based on novels. And add in a high standard of quality, and you get great television. Instead of buying old tried-and-true franchises that may have lost some of their sheen, you create new ones that give the company more value. It seems like the riskier way to go, but I think that Apple, as the smaller streamer, is going to win in the long run. They aren’t trying to peddle the same old IPs to a tired audience; they are creating exciting a new IPs to titillate their subscribers.

HBO is doing a pretty good job at creating good content as well. Though they don’t hit it out of the park as consistently as Apple, but then again, no one else is either.

And speaking of HBO and George R. R. Martin, I managed to start reading the second Dunk and Egg novella in the ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ collection before our guests arrived. So far, I like the story, and it seems like it will be another good one. Martin gets you vested into the story quickly and develops the other characters as well as setting up the conflict and the villain by the end of the first scene. There are definitely some writing lessons to be learned in those pages, but I will read it for pleasure first before I start to analyse the text. And it felt great to read today. I realised just how much I miss reading and that I need to make time to do it every day. Once we get into painting on the computer every day and my eyes start to get tired, it makes reading at night much more challenging.

Audible informed me today that I had five credits to use. I keep forgetting to go on their app and pick some books to listen to. I just can’t decide what books to listen to yet. Usually, there are obvious choices from writers I love or books with some real buzz around them. I suppose this is a good problem to have compared to everything else that is going on in the world at the moment.

When Paul and Laura were over today, I was complaining about how many notes I had in my iPhone’s Notes app. Paul mentioned a note app called ‘Listonic’, that is easily shared between people. Meaning I can have a grocery store list that I share with my wife and kids. We can add things we need or want throughout the week as they come to mind, and the list updates on everyone's phones. You can share lists with different people, which is useful for surprise birthdays and Christmas gift lists.

The only downside is that the free version has ads at the bottom, but they don’t bother me at all. I’ll suffer ads to get the app for nothing.

Paul also revealed a few more tidbits about his parsnip recipe from a few weeks ago that will help me make sure I get the correct result. He added I needed to heat the sheet pan up in the oven with the oil or fat on it beforehand. This ensures the parsnips get that lovely chewy and crispy outer texture. I’ll probably make the parsnips this week if I can get my hands on some beef tallow or even some duck fat. I think the duck fat would add a nice flavour.

I haven’t worked on my assignment today, maybe because I am feeling self-indulgent and I want to relax today. I am conscious of burning myself out and becoming a useless pile of nothing. I’m feeling more like myself today, and I think I am primed to get a lot of writing done tomorrow and actually enjoy it, as opposed to feeling like it’s work instead of play. This does mean that I will need to put in a full day of writing. That’s how I used to write when I was doing the short story a week. One day of intense focus and then six days of recovery with classes sprinkled in for constant learning.

We finished the last episode of Apple TV’s ‘Hijack’ starring Idris Elba. When the new season’s commercials aired and I saw it was going to be on a train, I was worried that it wouldn’t work this time around. But I think I enjoyed this season better than season one, and the writers did a good job using the train and creating believable incidents as to why the police didn’t just rush in or create a barrier of some kind to stop the train. I said train, but really was a subway train. Not as big and powerful as a full-sized locomotive.

There were some new actors in the show I hadn’t seen before, so it was good to see some fresh faces mixed in with some veteran actors like Toby Jones and there was even a German cast member from the series ‘Dark’ who plays Clara.

I think setting the story in Germany was a wise move as well. The city made for some great shots. And they needed a city with a modern rail system to make it all believable. Sometimes the setting is as much of a character as anyone else in a book or TV show, and that was certainly the case in ‘Hijack’.

But what will they hijack next? We joked it could be a submarine or maybe even a hot-air balloon.  This is the type of show that has to think out its scenario all the way through because you are stuck on the vehicle of choice for the entire season.

Maybe a cruise ship would be a cool setting for the hijacking to take place on. It’s a floating city, plenty of hidey holes and cool areas for scenes to happen. Maybe I’ll send Idris a script and see what he has to say about it.

My wife has a Chester drawer she inherited; I believe it was from her mom. It has a tilting mirror on the top and about six large drawers, three on each side. Today, one of the wooden knobs fell off as she was opening the drawer. So, I grabbed my carpenter’s wood glue and some sandpaper and went to work. Yeah, I know it’s not a big deal, but for a moment I felt like I was a member of that British television show, ‘The Repair Shop’, and as I lovingly sanded off the old glue. I heard myself narrating it to the audience and glancing towards the camera with a sneaky smile. I applied some glue and inserted the knob into the hole, taping it in place until the glue dried.

And then I waited for my wife to return and I would ask her, just like they do in the show, “What does this repair mean to you?” and she would get choked up and say it meant the world, that it looks better than it did before and that she can’t believe that I was able to fix her precious drawer knob.

But she hasn’t even noticed that I fixed it. Maybe I should have stood beside the piece of furniture with a sheet covering it waiting for the big reveal, just like they do on the show.

Oh well, not every hero wears a cape!

Time flies when you are having fun, and it is already one sixteen in the morning. I am for bed now; I think.

Night.