Ben's Projects - Part the First

So, I've been very lax about blogging, so picking up on H's bookmarks theme I've decided to do a weekly blog about a project - one per week.

This is partially tied in to me being without work after being made redundant at the end of March. No new job jumped out at me so I decided to start doing stuff around the house, and with my gaming, whilst I look for new work.

End result - each week I'll give myself a project and blog or vlog about it as I complete it. Sometimes it'll be to with gaming, sometimes DIY and sometimes gardening - or something totally different.

As a relatively easy (relatively) start - I decided to re-sort our CD collection. A few years back we decided to move our CDs into carry cases to ease up on storage space.

Step one: get all our CDs together:

They they all are - each pile represents a bunch of CDs, sorted by artist surname or band name.

Once these piles were done I realised I had 27 piles, despite only having artists starting with 23 letters of the alphabet. Oh and this one CD as well:

I discovered (using iTunes on the computer) that this is an album by pendulum.

That sorted I put it in the right pile and the laid all the piles out alphabetically in order to start sorting each pile individually and putting them into the cases.

Here the piles are laid out alphabetically:

The next part took a good two hours - not overly helped by me missing piles or parts of piles and then having to take a load of CDs out of the case to sort it out.

Eventually I got there, with a few hiccups and a couple of CDs ending up in what is technically the wrong place. In discussion H and I decided that this is probably something I should only do once a year - which is something of a relief. Here are the two carriers with our complete CD collection. 

So that's it until next time - I just need to work out what my next project will be.

I wore the clothes out!

Hi internet!

Today Ben and I went up Glastonbury Tor  and I was brave enough to wear one of my new short dresses. I didn't only wear leggings, I wore bright blue leggings, and I loved them. I felt kind of self conscious but I loved it and I'm proud of myself for wearing the outfit.

Dress George at asda, leggings Marisota, sandals asda again, sunglasses primark, catbag from a stall at a festival, hair models own

'twas a little windy up there!

Not bad huh?

Love and kisses,

H.

A bookmark a week #2 sourdough hot cross buns

 Hello again!

I've got a current project where I select a bookmark on my phone and do something with it (as opposed to leave it there and do nothing). I talked about it last week here,

A bookmark a week #1

So I had to do a new one this week and as it's nearly Easter I chose.... sourdough hot cross buns! Here's the link I'm using

http://laurenbakes.co.uk/2013/03/spiced-stout-sourdough-hot-cross-buns/

Don't they look amazing?

Ben and I discovered sourdough last year  when I read about how easy it was in this Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0747598401/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?qid=1397568889&sr=8-4&pi=AC_SX110_SY165

Basically you need flour and water. That's it! We have our very own starter that we pretentiously named Marjorie and we feed her with spelt flour and we love her very much.

She may not be a looker but by criminy she makes excellent bread.

We often make a loaf and eat it while making inappropriately orgasmic noises, so I thought we should try a variation.

I love hot cross buns. 

I should qualify that. I love my mum's homemade hot cross buns. 

The shop bought ones, even fancy ones from marks and spencer, always seem a bit light and tea-cakey rather than crusty and bready. I also dislike eating them when it isn't Easter. I may eat one or two beforehand to check a batch or a couple afterwards to get them eaten, but that isn't normally an issue...

The joy of hot cross buns is to eat them at home, toasted and smothered in good quality butter accompanied by a big mug of tea. Mmmmm.....   butter....

Er... where was I? 

Right, baking. 

Given the above, I have pretty high standards for hot cross buns and I'd never mastered them to my satisfaction. I was super excited to try the sourdough ones and, it turns out, I was delighted with the results. Of course I had to amend the recipe a little, it's a running joke in our house that I never do any recipe exactly as it says, I always have to tweak it a wee bit. The only 3 changes here were to use Mackesons milk stout rather than Guinness as I find it has a sweeter flavour for cooking, sultanas rather than raisins and substituting some of the mixed peel for crystallised ginger because it's delicious.

Having only made a very simple sourdough loaf from the book above, I wasn't too confident with the whole stretching and folding technique in the recipe, but I'm pretty happy with how this went.

 Not bad eh?

Then the laborious step of portioning out the buns. Weighing each one was new to me, I normally just guess (are we seeing why I'm maybe not the most consistent baker?) and I can't deny, these are much more even than any rolls or buns I've made before.

I couldn't get them all on one tray so I had to cook them in 2 batches but the proving times in sourdough are long and flexible so that was fine.

Once proved I had to pipe on the crosses. I only recently discovered I could pipe at all. I thought it was me, but it turns out having a crappy piping set and bag is why I couldn't before...

It turned out ok. Messy, but ok.

After baking they looked like this and are bloody delicious. 

I only sampled one, just to test the batch!

So now they're in the freezer, we have delicious hot cross buns for Easter and I've copied the recipe into my beautiful book. 

That's another bookmark deleted, I wonder what will be next...

Love and kisses

H.

A bookmark a week #1 Map of Tasmania - Update

Evening all,

I did dun it! I learnt the song and now I can play it at all suitable family gatherings. Well, my family's gatherings, maybe not others'.

Turns out it's 2 chords and 1 of those is open strings so I'll admit it wasn't too much of a challenge...

The recording isn't exactly professional standard, but it's proof and, dammit, that's good enough.

http://alonetone.com/helbenmusic/tracks

Love and kisses,

H.

A bookmark a week #1 Map of Tasmania

I have so many bookmarks saved on my phone. Every time I see a cool recipe or tip or anything really, I save it down. I'm particularly guilty of keeping recipes on there, despite my friend giving me this beautiful book to write them in a few years ago.

The problem is there are so many that I can never find what I want. So I've set myself a project.

Each week I'm going to take a bookmark on my phone and do something with it. 

If it's a recipe I've made and I like it, I'll copy it into my beautiful book. If I haven't made it before I'll give it a go and copy it in if I like it. Anything else, I'll make it up as I go along.

Then I'll delete them. Bold, eh?

Needless to say, I'll inevitably add new bookmarks as I go along, but they can just be added to the project. I can't keep my whole life on my phone (can I? Don't we all?).

So this week, I chose this.

http://www.ukulele-tabs.com/uke-songs/amanda-palmer/map-of-tasmania-uke-tab-22008.html

We saw Amanda Palmer on her tour last year and, while in many ways she's flawed, I respect what she's trying to do and I don't think she's calculated, just privileged (aren't we all?)

Turns out I can't use this link anymore, but I do have a tabs app on my phone, Ultimate Guitar, and they have a version I can use. I'll learn it on my lovely little uke this week and record it at the end of the week to prove I dunnit! Exciting, no? 

By the way, if you want to use Ultimate Guitar, here's the link

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ultimate-guitar-tabs-largest/id357828853?mt=8

I really like it and find it super easy to use. It lets me transpose songs into keys so easy that even I can play them!

I'll follow up in a week with my recording as promised.

Love and kisses,

H.

Concrete Cow 14 - By Ben and Helen

So this weekend was Concrete Cow 14 - a small one day RPG convention on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. I'd booked the time off work as part of my birthday treat and basing ourselves in Aylesbury with H's mum we headed over to Wolverton first thing on Saturday morning.

This year they were trying something new with the sign-ups - collecting them all in and putting them out at 0930. Personally I liked this, however I was running first slot, so didn't need to join the rush for that game, therefore I was able to sign H and myself up to James' Blood and Water game in the afternoon slot. The evening was looking very bare at this time, so we left it and hoped things would improve.

Slot 1:

Ben - I ran The One Ring, taking my 'Strangers in the Night' scenario out for it's 5th convention outing (I think). This is actually less a scenario and more of an adventure hook - I've got the opening set-up prepped and a couple of encounters ready - other than that I go along with the players and react to what they do. This suits my more Indie playstyle of recent days, and works well for me. I use the characters from my ongoing G+ campaign and am lucky enough that one of my players has done character art for all four characters - as seen below.

The session seemed to go well, with some interesting tactics thought up for dealing with the Cave troll the Fellowship faced, involving shifting the canopy somewhat to let the sunlight through.

It was mentioned by one of the players afterwards that TOR would make a good 3-4 slot mini-campaign for a convention - so I'm starting to look at doing this for Conception next year.

H was still playing when this had finished  so I went to the stores to spend my birthday money - I got everything I could have wanted, and spent less than I'd allowed myself - so double win. From Leisure Games I picked up The Primeval Companion, Perfect Unrevised, Forsooth and Beat to Quarters. From all rolled up I got myself and Helen one of their dice/roll up things each.

 

     




Helen - I played in Mik Reed's game of The Tavern. I'd wanted to play this for a while so was really pleased to get in on a game, particularly with Mik, always fun! It was pretty cool, dealing with the small events in the tavern/restaurant/diner/bar we really got an idea of who the characters were, even when they only appeared for 1 scene, and the cards, food and characters all reflecting each other was neat, made it easy to picture the characters. Lovely gentle game for the morning.

Slot 2: - We both played in James Mullen's Blood and Water game - thoughts below. Blood and Water is kind of Being Human the RPG, with a disparate bunch of supernatural housemates trying to make their way in the mortal world. Our set of 4 housemates was a Skinwalker, A fallen Lucifer, an 8 year old child turned into a (Chucky-esque) Garden Gnome and my Australian Were-Kangaroo.

Ben - I thoroughly enjoyed this session, but made the mistake of creating a character who was going to be a layabout a lot of the time. This meant it took me longer to get into the action - however once I did all was good, and I felt we made a fun, sinister and fairly silly at times story out of our mixed housemates.

Helen - a game with Ben, Mik and Steve run by James? Predictably super-fun. I got to explore my diseased imagination and discovered an awesome creepy giggle to freak Ben out with.

Slot 3: - We checked out the games for the evening slot, and being as there were very few up discussed heading back to Aylesbury early, however Toad stepped up and offered a game of Dead of Night, so we joined this and got a third game each.

Ben - I played a high school quarterback, turned mechanic with the flaws of 'Leap before he looks' and 'Never Backs Down'. This inevitability led to my character dying, but I was throwing around my survival points like there was no tomorrow and got to go out in a blaze of glory - literally, I set myself on fire and charged the evil tree that was casting a shadow over our small American town. I had great fun with this game, so many thanks to Toad for stepping up and running it.

Helen - I enjoyed this too, good game, great GM and awesome players. I liked my character, standard vain blonde horror film fodder, but I painted myself into a corner a bit so couldn't do much to progress the story. I did enjoy providing a bit of colour obsessing over the leather-clad, motorcycling loner though...

Once more I had a great day, the only thing was the lack of games in the late slot - this did get sorted in the end. Normally I'd have offered something myself, however I'd promised myself only one game ran and two played this year - and, unusually for me, I had nothing in my bag or the car to offer. Next Cow I'll probably run two slots again - one of these as the evening slot.

Keep gaming

Ben & Helen

One small step for fatkind

So today Ben and I went shopping, and I wore this.

Not the most exciting of outfits, I know. The skirt is bright, but mostly I'm wearing it because it's long 

and I feel the need to cover up as much as possible. See, I'm fat and according to society at large that's not ok. I'm not here to get into a debate about the health issue, however I would say that, if it's better to be thinner healthwise, I'm pretty sure making me feel terrible about myself isn't the answer to helping me get the weight off. Also, most diets don't work long term so I'm not going to try a health intervention that's been shown not to work. 

Right, now that's off my chest we can proceed. 

I like to walk. I love being out in the world (apart from being around people who shout abuse at me, doesn't happen too regularly, but enough to make me wary of groups of young men and kids), walking makes me feel strong and it helps my historic back and shoulder problems. However, I live in England so a lot of the time I'm walking in rain. As I'm sure you can imagine, my preferred uniform of long skirts and flared trousers is a bit of a pain in these circumstances as they soak up the groundwater and deposit it on my shoes, so even waterproof shoes have issues, particularly lace-ups.

Now I love the way I look in leggings, but I appreciate that not everyone in the world will. I'd love to go out in them and a long top but I'm just not that brave yet. So I thought maybe a short dress....?

I tried to go to evans to look for one, but the store listed on the website no longer existed, so.... great work there evans. 

This is me giving evans the side-eye

Given that I'm already limited in where I can shop this was a blow that I could have done without.

Luckily there was an asda across the way so I decided to give that a try. I got 2 dresses, and I'm currently trying to build up the courage to wear them out of the house. 

I think they'll be great in a spring shower and I can pair them with my lovely new pink crocs (judge me as much as you like, I bloody love them!).

Let me know what you think, is it ok to wear a short dress so I ca walk more easily? If not, why not? I'm intellectually convinced it is, but somehow I'm still scared to do it.

Love and kisses,

H.