leiacat: A grey cat against background of starry sky, with lit candle in the foreground (Default)
[personal profile] leiacat
A couple weeks ago we went out to Shi Miao Dao Noodle House, which for the last year-or-two occupied the location of the rather lovely Japanese joint next to my favorite Vietnamese, An Loi. They also go by "Ten Seconds", which I believe their name translates to.

What they do is a bowl of broth into which you throw many things, but all of their broths are either spicy or porky or tomatoey, so I hadn't tried to make the time. Well, they do have other things, and I decided to go for dumplings and supplement them with a rice ball. Spouse went for a tomato-broth soup, and reviewed it favorably, and the spicy soupy things our friends had also hit the spot with them.

Me, I was a bit less lucky: as everyone else was served I got a question instead: did you order the chicken mushroom dumplings, but instead I made chicken soup dumplings, is that ok? I can't say it was necessarily thrilling, but I didn't exactly want to wait for a whole nother batch, so I went for them. And they were entirely ok. I also got the rice ball described as "shu mai" (shrimp); the shrimp was chopped into small enough bits that little texture remained, and the texture of the rice ball made me feel like it had sat for a while. (A couple days later I picked up a very similar rice ball from the deli counter at Lotte supermarket, and it was superior in nearly every way.)

We split an order of milk buns for dessert, and those were just fine.

It took rather longer than 10 seconds, but I would go back, if only to try the thing I actually ordered. Though maybe with a different second thing.

When last October The Big Greek Cafe first came to town (to replace the excellent Madrid tapas place, sigh) we attended its grand opening and won a door prize in the form of a gift card. (Then we forgot about it for a while.) We split a trio of appetizers - falafel for Spouse (which came with a bonus salad), calamari for me (with pita), and spanakopita to split. The first two came with containers of very dense tzatziki, and each was a perfectly adequate example. The spanakopita was, nicely, a rather sizeable mini-pie of it, rather than a slice of a larger sheet; I think I prefer this presentation, and it was a good size to round out the meal. All in all, a pleasant enough outing, though I don't know that I'd prioritize returning to it.

First night of ESCape!

Jul. 1st, 2025 12:55 am
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I am at Pinewoods, is I think the way these entries start, and they are always happy entries to write.

I arrived at camp, and swung past my cabin in and amongst other tasks in order to open the windows and get it ready for me to bring all my stuff up. And upon opening the door, found the entire place covered in beautiful hanger fine art. There were probably about 50 hangers scattered across any hangerable surface, and a lovely wire sculpture dangling through the middle. My friends know me well, and I genuinely did use some of them to hang some of my clothes, so truly a win-win.

Unpacking was aided by a SamSam coming to say hello, and then off to the staff meeting, and then off to the porch. There are many people I adore here --more than I could easily spend time with all at once. That is one of the downsides of ESCape being so good and so popular. My affections have been a bit ADHD today, but I think I haven't left anyone feeling abandoned.

Dinner was delicious, dessert was vegan chocolate cake (I chose not to try and break my record from LCFD weekend, and only ate four pieces). And then there was some beautiful English dancing --I missed the first one but caught the other three, with kateface, then mom, then Robin. And then announcements. And then...

...my first night of calling, like as a serioustimes staff caller, holy shit. This is the biggest teaching assignment I've ever had, like, this could make or break my Scottish Country Dance career. (It's not gonna, there's enough other things I do that will also help, but this is a pretty serious event. It's still not the Big Goal, but it's well in the right direction).

And I nailed it. I got a _ton_ of compliments, including some from extremely well established callers themselves, and some of them with really lovely details that showed good attention and observation to what I try to do. At least one person told me I did a good job of not over-explaining, which is extremely funny to me to consider, given that I want to talk all the time endlessly about everything. But I do try and keep the dance floor flowing real fast --some of this is my training from my tutors, and some of this is my own kinesthetic learning (I want to _do_ the dance, not talk about the dance!)

I was a healthy four minutes under on my time limit, and they asked for an encore for the last one, and I said "yeah, this is a good thing to explain to the dancers anyways". I think I might've been just maybe a minute over after that, but not anything more (so I apologize if the dancers got a four minute break instead of five, or if Ben lost a minute of the contras). I will keep being hyperaware of the timing. I like trying to keep track of how long it takes to do things.

And then I was through the calling, five solid and rapidly done dances (and a very slight sense of smugness, because a week or two ago I got an email from the organizers being all "oh yeah, there are first night announcements and therefore your set needs to be a little shorter timewise than it normally would be, do you want to cut anything?" And I decided to be brave and sassy and said "you know, I _could_ cut the fourth dance if I need, but numbers two and three are 6x32 anyways, and I think I've got this. And I did!)

And the last dance I called was a bit of a stretch goal, a dance I absolutely _adore_ (Lords of the Wind), but felt like would maybe be tricky? And everyone did great! I called it well and clearly, and so the walk-through zipped along, and then we just did it and it went well and like I said, encored! I am getting more and more evidence for the fact that I can and should take the really fun slightly complex flowy dances and go ham on them, even with extremely mixed-level floors. Because I'm surprisingly good at calling them, and my confidence is carrying over so that my dancers can dance them.

(and my music was so good already, and I have three more days to listen to this! Amazing!!!)

After I finished, I got to look at a cool bug (putting a line in my bio that said "I love cool bugs show them to me" ACTUALLY WORKED!) and I chatted with mom some and I determined that I was extremely sticky and hot, despite not having dancing, so I'd better do a couple contras to really commit to being hot enough to jump in the pond after. A lovely one with Myles where we exactly crossed the floor from first to last couple, and then the last contra I danced with Mo and we did a social experiment around carcinization.

(It started as the usual kinda goofing around, with some nice gremliny deep knee squats on the petronella. I'm not sure who in the walk-through turned it into crab hands and sideways prancing around to the next place. But Mo and I committed, and did it every single time our way around, even though it was _exhausting_. It was a ton of fun, and I'd say over 75% of the neighbor couples did at least a little crabbing with us! And after, singleSam1, who had been the couple just in front of us, complimented us on the fact that they were chased by the delighted laughter of couples becoming crabs with us for the whole dance).

Austin and I waltzed, which was lovely lovely lovely, and then I managed to squeze between Austin and Tess for the song. Into the pond go I, which was surprisingly perfect. I still didn't stay long, but I didn't jump in and start cussing (which happens a lot to me) and when I came out, I was not immediately shivering.

Party and admiring tinfoil costumes and a polycool meeting and back to my cabin relatively on time to sleep. If I hurry, I could get six hours solid before having to go to breakfast! That'd be keen. Just have to dip down to the wifi shed to upload these, and then go brush my teeth.

Happy happy happy!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: "bells Sam" is not actually a differentiator, because SamSam also does bells.

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Report: Summerisle Burn

Jun. 30th, 2025 11:21 am
leiacat: A grey cat against background of starry sky, with lit candle in the foreground (Default)
[personal profile] leiacat
I've long been interested in checking out a burner event someday, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to invest into camping equipment without knowing that camping was a thing I could actually tolerate. So when a friend couple - who enable so many of my adventures that they deserve a designation, and hereby shall be listed as Satyr-and-Spouse - suggested that we join them to camp together using their gear and their expertise, the opportunity was too good to pass up.

Men of great worth resorted to this forest )

Ready for camp!

Jun. 29th, 2025 10:22 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I finished all my packing for Pinewoods _surprisingly_ early --I was done a bit before 2:30pm, which was surprisingly charming. It meant that mom and Robin and I could go out to Boda Borg for the afternoon! We did a lovely four hour run, in which we got three stamps (Quiz Show: Quotes, Star Trails, and the weather one) and morally got a fourth (the last room of Area 51 is _much_ harder with three than with five, and even when we temporarily joined with another group, we still couldn't quite get it, but we know the _idea_). It was jolly!

I'm somewhat unsettled by being fully packed, and reassuring myself with the fact that I still have a bunch of MC/teacher prep work I can/should do, and a fair chunk of printing that needs to happen (after the prep work). I did find my _critically_ important Rowan1 notebook, which has my ESCape teaching notes for every year starting when I got my full certificate in 2019. It was extremely lost, and I probably spent a total of 20-30 minutes trying to find it, sigh.

I am excited and pleased to leave for ESCape tomorrow. I'll be in the camp in the woods until the 12th or 13th of July or so, so probably not a lot of posting, and definitely continuing my horrid streak of not reading very well. I really ought to figure out a way to work reading dreamwidth into my day-to-day life at times other than part of Standard Morning Routine, because all this traveling and adventure nonsense means my standard routine hasn't been.

I've definitely mentioned somewhere here that I'm teaching at ESCape, right? I am _psyched_ for that. Really strongly looking forward to it, and kinda wicked excited that I will then be going to Scottish sessions and having very few responsibilities so I can just kinda kick back and actually relax for a tickyboo. Maybe I will even wind up working at camp a skootch, who knows!

Anyways, today has been pretty good, even if I've been Very Tired (it is possible I was up _stupid_ late last night in order to do most of my packing, but it's okay, I've had a lot of days in a row of getting eight or nine hours of sleep. I've got backup sleep! Which is very very good to go into Pinewoods with.)

I hope you are well and happy and having good adventures. I hope that we can have a better world than the one that is actually happening. I wish I had anything more useful to say than that.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: Rowan is the mascot of the RSCDS youth branch. They are a sheep and they use they pronouns and they are extremely important to me. I have cosplayed them! Carefully, since specifically they are a Scottish Blackface Sheep.

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