Happy New Year! Kind of a boring holiday here in Switzerland, so there's only one thing to do -- watch Doctor Who!

As "previously on Doctor Who" rolls on screen, I'm getting ready to play Doctor Who End of Time 2 Bingo...

( Running thoughts behind the cut. )

Ooops.  Well, I didn't just set the kitchen on fire, just my heating pad neck thing in the microwave. 0.0 It's a little smoky in here now.

I guess it was old enough that the moisture content in the buckwheat was no longer sufficient to, well, not catch fire.

I guess I need a new neck thingy.

I haven't done any actual work yet today--The White City is the next thing on my agenda--but I have been Exceedingly Productive Bear. You see, thecoughlin and TBRE and my mom and I went in on a winter CSA share, and tomorrow another ten or fifteen pounds of root vegetables will be descending upon my kitchen. So today, I had to use up most of the previous share, which has been malingering due to holidays and so forth.

I figured I would just cook everything, and it could be instant leftovers/veggie snacks and/or lunch (or breakfast, because as is often the case when I get up and start cooking, I forgot to eat anything), and I started a pan of roasted yams with salt (tiny ones, so I left the skin on.) and a pan of roasted beets, celeriac, and carrots with ginger and honey. I also tried my first-ever batch of sauerkraut*, which, if I am lucky and it works, we can have with kielbasa in a couple of weeks. I used a lot of garlic. I am very excited.

So lunch was two hard-boiled eggs (there are now only four left from the last flat from the ag coop down the block) and kimchi, with root veggies as a second course. I feel replete with healthful phytochemicals, lemme tell you.

Dinner last night was goat cheese tart in filo pastry with sauteed mushrooms. The mushrooms were a new thing too--white beech mushrooms, Hypsizygus tessellatus, which have that awful acrid taste that unripe persimmons have when raw (high tannin content, maybe?), but cook up into, well, mushrooms! I made them a bit overspicy-spicy, maybe, because we didn't have any white wine (I usually use white wine, onions, garlic, butter, thyme) and I was experimenting with different flavor profiles. But they were still pretty good; I just would have liked to taste the mushrooms more and the habanero less.

I was walking around the kitchen all last night going "Hypsizygus tessellatus!" with great portentousness and magnificent gesticulations. I need to write a story where the incantatory magic system is based on the Latin names of fungi.

Oh, and I thought of a cool thing for the Heroic Hookers Of The Old West novel today, if I ever get to write it.

I love living here, where I can walk down to the farmer's coop on the corner and buy local eggs and apples (they're supposed to have fresh veg this summer, though at that point we will be working through the SUMMER CSA and the garden and may be living in fear of veg), and where there are such things as wintertime CSAs. And I love the CSA because it not only encourages the eating of many many tasty vegetables (I swear you really can taste the vitamins in food that hasn't been cold-stored for months and then shipped all over the world--as we say around here, "Hey! There's food in my food!") but also because it supports local farms and makes me be creative. (Celeriac? Really? Cool!)

I should start using up the frozen fruit and tomatoes I put up last summer. It's January, after all. Soon it will be summer again.

I'm all about fridge-cleaning cookery today.

So later on I will make whole-wheat sourdough pancakes to give the shoggoth some exercise (we will eat them with the last of the borscht for lunch), and I will make whole-wheat crust pizza to use up the last of the pizza sauce and some lingering goat cheese and mozzarella, and life will be good. TBRE and I have agreed that today is a day for hanging around and not doing much of anything--she's off watching anime and playing with the cats, and I'm on the couch with the dog.

And maybe I will eat a persimmon, since there is one left. And play some guitar, and work on my manuscript, which is a complete draft and only needs to be made perfect now.

That sounds like a very good first day of this year that sounds like a science fiction year, for sure.

All that's left of the CSA at this point is two butternut squashes and four or five little delicatas, and since the squash is apparently going to run out after this week, I don't mind having those lingering--we'll get to them, and they'll keep until we do.

---

Margaret Atwood and Karen Armstrong talk about science fiction and religion on NPR.

---

*here's a picture where you can see the beautiful color. That's a bag of water acting as a seal under the unscrewed lid--I think it should let the fermentation products outgas safely. I know, it's a small batch of sauerkraut, but there are only two of us, and it was only one head of cabbage. And oh, the smell of garlic.

What did I learn at New Years? I got schooled on weird, angry African animals that could only fall into the "Looking to start some shit" category, namely:

The Honey Badger - The Terminators of Nature, Honey Badgers are regarded by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most fearless creatures walking the Earth. They're called honey badgers because they have a large appetite for beehives, like African killer bees and will sometimes team up with honeyguide birds to locate and raid a hive. The Honey Badger is also known for it's lack of fear taking on creatures much larger than itself. It's more wolverine than a wolverine.

The real gift of Honey badgers though is their snake-killing ability. They have no problem taking on puff adders and cobras, and will, on occasion, allow themselves to get bitten in a fight so that they can get close enough to use their jaws to grab the snake behind its head and execute a coup de grace. After the snake is dead, they fall over in a torporous state, using the snakes corpse as a pillow, and then they sleep off the ridiculously toxic poison, wake up, and eat the snake. They can devour a snake (150 cm/5ft or less) in 15 minutes.

The other animal I was introduced to anectdotally was a Pangolin.

Pangolin - Not as fierce as the honey badger, but still a pretty tough customer, the Pangolin is a sometimes bipedal long-tailed nocturnal anteater protected by a thick armour of chitinous razor-sharp scales. Its front claws are so long that they're unsuited for walking, and so it lopes with its fore paws curled over to protect them. It can also emit a noxious acid from its anus, like a skunk, when life is not going well.

These little guys will use their tongues (which can extend up to 16") to extract Fire Ants from their mounds. This is considerably painful, but they don't care. I expect that the process of a Pangolin attacking a fire ant mound is similar to Godzilla swinging into Tokyo. Apparently, most of their brain is dedicated to problem solving, and they have a reputation as escape artists.

Weird New Year to you!

Far more entertaining and far better than I'd expected from the frankly tacky trailer, and from the interview that I'd seen with the actress playing Mary Morstan. (Biggest beef: Holmes knew Mary Morstan, from the Sign of Four. Ahem.)

It was clearly (to me, anyhow) a movie made with a great deal of affection for the characters.

It is also a sad commentary on a number of things that the female characters get more agency, competence, and independence than in any number of modern action movies. Bah. (Yes, I did like their Irene Adler.)

After that, I do think that yes, I would like to see a sequel. Especially if it follows on as worthily from the hints that they were setting up in this one. One can hope.

At the popular decade. Which is kind of nice to use right now, because ten years ago was before a major life milestone.

At this time ten years ago, I believe I was asleep. I'd been to the Minn-StF New Year's Eve Party at Dreampark the night before, I was headed for Larry Sanderson's Hair-of-the-Dog Party that afternoon. daedala was renting my spare room.

I was a single 40-year-old male with no romantic prospects. I was nine months in to a free year on matchmaker.com (I wonder if they're still around? ... Yep - they've changed their focus somewhat, but are still there!) that was being really depressing. I'd been sending probably 2-3 'hello's' each week - I'd gotten maybe 5 replies, and actually met 1 lady in person. It wasn't working out.

In about 2.5 months I'd start corresponding with iraunink. In three months I'd meet her. In just over ten months we'd get married. I had no idea this was coming. (I have a joke about this - if someone had told me on Valentine's Day 2000 that I'd be celebrating Valentine's Day 2001 with my wife, I'd have told them they were crazy.)

Yes, there's some bad stuff that happened in the past ten years - diagnosed with Large Granular Lymphocyte Leukemia, lost a job, currently working at a job I'm having a hard time coping with. But that's all dwarfed by the wonderful changes my lovely wife iraunink caused.

I hope the next ten years are as good as the last.

Well, really for yesterday, but I was kept too busy to post it. I was in the shower that morning when, as the culmination of a train of thought I no longer remember, I found my mouth pronouncing the name "Ichigo Kurosaki" as 'IchIgho' quroSa'qIy'. And wondering, in general, how a tlhIngan Hol translation of Bleach would go over. (Transliterating the names is my main obsession so far. I haven't found any real use for capital Q, except maybe in ghImjow' jaghajaQ and SunSuy' Qora'qu'.)

Believe it or not, it was for this post that I finally broke down and made that Ichigo minifig I've been contemplating. Yeah, I'm going through the Gate of the End when my time comes.

Happy birthday, ficbitches, graceano, pecunium, pingback_bot and my very own md_donighal! And... some kind of birthday, bad_god.

And now I'm off to work eight hours.

• 08:56 @karlyl how are you suppose to be my sugar momma without your wallet?? #
• 09:08 @karlyl everybody was kungfu pimping! Huuaah! #
• 15:39 My son Fox: "Why would the Muslims hate Jewish people? ... they share the same God" ... if only they'd all listen to a 12 year old. #
• 16:47 Yay traffic ... bleh #
• 18:59 More traffic and i desperately need advil. #

... and that, as they say, is that.

Happy Birthday prettymuchpeggy & profitne

I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while: I watched Zero Effect. Good flick. Great flick.

"It's gonna be the future soon / And I won't always be this way / When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away"

Well, it's the future now. Another year gone by. 2009 was, all things considered, not a great year for me (though it did end with me getting a laptop, so it's not been all bad). I spent all but the first bit of it unemployed, and all but the last bit of it recovering from a broken leg.

Even leaving aside the laptop, I guess it hasn't been entirely terrible. I helped (in a very small way) organize and run the first annual SpringfieldGAME convention, and I got my first professional freelance writing gigs for the Springfield Business Journal. And even the broken leg meant I got to spend more time with my parents than I have since before I went back to college for my second (successful) degree, and take a number of trips up to Columbia.

But I hope I get a job again this year.

Tutoring
Original
Tristan->Jake

This was actually an in-email bit of prose RP Zazzle and I did to get some of the voices prepped *g*. But we mentioned it in the chan later and people said they wanted to see it, soooo. Here it is.

( Tutoring )

This is a set of drabbles Zazzle requested me to write for Luka and Elli stuff that she then adjusted somewhat and sent out for dreams.

Luka&Elli Dream Drabbles
Also includes some kit :')
Original

( Luka & Elli Dream Drabbles )

The Letters in the Box
Original
Kit and Bastien
These were actually an item found in the cry wolf game and were co-written with Zazzle but I'm posting them here anyway for posterity bleh. /o/ Since they're all plot and backstory.

( The Letters in the Box )

Sugar
Original
Kit/Bastien

( Sugar )

Attempts
Original
Kit/Bastien drabble

100 words of attempting to grow facial hair. :(b

( Attempts )

As I gathered together my fic links for the upcoming "everything I wrote this year" list I realized that several things I sent Zazzle, usually as part of prepping for a cry wolf game, never went online. So lol I'll post a few right now.

Hanged
Original cfuw-haunted house verse
Kit/Bastien

( Hanged )

Flu has struck my mom's house! Greg and I are still going fine, but mom and Zazzle are down for the count (or on their knees in front of the toilet for the count). New Years is being memorable for them in the very wrong way :(

Happy New Years all, regardless!

I got it at Target over the summer in a little grow kit, but I foolishly threw away the packaging and don't remember what species it is. This is the vine from the other day, BTW.

MikeOS is pretty nifty.

Installing Vitual Box, not so much. Six warnings is kind of scary.

I've been sitting in a coffeeshop just down the strip mall from where I pay my rent all afternoon, browsing the web and blogging from my new laptop. It is a really great experience. I can do just as well as or better than I could at home, and I get the benefit of surroundings that are not my own.

My latest post has to do with the Cherrypal Africa laptop, and the lack of communication some people are getting about the status of their orders. It seems that the Hong Kong distributor messed up the packaging and as a result there are no tracking numbers available. This is aggravated by the traditionally slow shipping around the double holiday season.

Anyway, I've stayed here longer than I meant to, and am probably going to have to take the night bus home. I'm not sure whether I'll try to stop off in Park Central Square or not. A lot of the venues there are doing their $7 admission "First Night" celebration. Not really my thing, especially since I can't stay out until midnight unless I want to take a taxi home. Maybe I'll call and see if Coffee Ethic isn't.

Anyway, I'm really really happy about this computer, and grateful to everyone who gave it to me. Between this and my old one is the difference between night and day.

I decided to give Dominators another try, since my play style has changed since giving up on TerraRyze, and since Dominators have been changed a little. Same basic "really bad day" origin story, but instead of Earth/Lightning, he's Mind Control/Earth Assault.
( Of course I had to use several 'Terra' costume pieces )

A giant ridiculous dog and his aardvark in the snow:



Happy new year!

Got to the Great Buffet in the snow. Got home. Must remember to check and see if I have Valtrex in the cabinet because I'm getting ANOTHER FREAKING COLD SORE.

Spouse is almost done reading through LA1. He has snickered 3 times total that I've noticed. I twitch every time he sighs because I don't know if he's breathing or making editorial exhalations.

INwatch: Core Rules: 446, Lilith: 380 (yay!), Eli: 360 (yay!), Liber Umbrarum: 224, Litheroy: 217, Asmodeus: 192 (yay!), Infernal Player's Guide: 123, GURPS In Nomine: 82, Zadkiel: 72 (no change for 3 days), Liber Canticorum: 29, Game Master's Guide: 20.
Adventures: City On Fire: 116, Strange Bedfellows: 93, Feast of Blades: 92, The Rats' Revenge: 86.
Free Adventures: A Very Nybbas Christmas: 4132, The Sorcerer's Impediments: 2692.
Not IN: Sahudese Fire Drill: 77, GURPS IOU: 62, GURPS Classic All-Star Jam 2004: 61 (fell off the bottom). Not IN or mine: Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and RPG: 229.


( Dragons under fold )

galbinus_caeli offers a totally awesome free-form poll:

If you had to live in the world of a science fiction disaster novel, who would be the author? (Optionally: Why?)

Forecast for tonight through the weekend is intermittent snowpocalypse, which just started.

It's SNOWING!

Scalloped potatoes and spinach bread for breakfast*. Life is not so bad.

Also, Val Kilmer is fifty today. Congratulations GenX. We have officially lived longer than we ever expected to.

---

*TBRE brought it home. Quoth she: "I think the secret ingredient is butter." Quoth me: gnarsh chomp mwar!

Ask me about my unpopular fandom opinion, and I shall spew forth some vitriol for you. Or, you know, express an opinion. Depends how I'm feeling, really.



Ganked from quietprofanity. Answers won't be posted until the new year. :D

Alternate: http://schmevil.dreamwidth.org/208333.html.

Happy birthday, bsquad, ryuutchi and siliconshaman!

help pinned under cats send assistance.

Especially since I really need to get up and ice everything that still hurts after yesterday's epic climbing success. And maybe eat something, based on the complaints my stomach is making.

And probably let the poor dog out.

Today is my last Day Off--work on The White City resumes tomorrow, and when that is done, "The Unicorn Evils." So I plan to spend today catching up on two weeks' worth of Mythbusters, reading this manuscript I am helping a friend with, and maybe taking the dog for a run since it's not too cold. Oh, and reading that damned Girl Genius collection I have been trying to get to for months now.

Tonight, the usual shindig with netcurmudgeon, ashacat, and two charming young men of my acquaintance. (And others, of course).

Farewell, 2009. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

• 13:25 I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one ~ Mark Twain #
• 13:31 Happiness is the Glee Soundtrack. :D #
• 15:45 Is there something about rain that makes every stoplight in this town go incredibly slow? #
• 00:14 You, like me, just lost The Game. #

... and that, as they say, is that.

Watched The Turn of the Screw last night: a new BBC adaptation, and one that I enjoyed a lot. (I admit that I'm closer to the Britten opera than I am to the book, but even so . . . and no, this version wasn't sung.) It preserved a lovely sense of ambiguity. Comparing it to the The Day of the Triffids adaptation that was on for the two nights before it, while the Triffids adaptation was glossier and longer, and was a perfectly enjoyable thing in itself, the Turn of the Screw adaptation was far less predictable. Triffids turned into just another disaster movie. With the Screw adaptation, I didn't know which way it was going to jump.

I even stopped knitting for the last ten minutes or so.

Going to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie this evening. I am told it's a lot better than the trailer makes it look. I do hope so.

Happy Birthday elorie, kk1raven & sfrose

NOTES FOR TODAY:

- Finished P3 after 140 hours of logged gameplay and two years of poking at it on and off. *g* ...only the Journey though. Next up: The Answer.

- SAW SHERLOCK HOLMES WITH ZAZZLE AND MOM AND HER HUSBAND god SO AMAZING. Zazzle and I kept clinging to each other gleefully throughout. Also this could not appear at a better period of our life/writing life and I think many of you know why lol.

- Attention katmaxwell and thehoyden: The Stephen Fry alarm clock, comes in a "sir" and a "madam" version. And begins with birdsong and polite throat clearing.

- I... think my yuletide recipient may not have known about the archive changeover. When I go to look for her name as an "Archive of our Own" member... I can't find it. And I've received no comments from her. So I'm pretty worried at this point. And not sure what I should do if so...

- /o/

It is a novel experience lying in bed with an unplugged laptop on my lap, typing without the worry that my battery might run out within about thirty seconds of unpluggedness. Even now I'm having a hard time fighting the urge to leap out of bed, grab the cables out of the laptop bag, and hastily plug them into the wall.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Sunday evening, those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook will know, my brother Aaron picked me up in the "Chef Bus"—the short bus that he and his wife Karen bought for their ever-growing family (four kids plus a dog, and a fifth kid on the way), so named because Karen is a Pampered Chef dealer—and we trucked on down to the parents' home out in the southwest Missouri countryside for a slightly-late Christmas celebration. We watched the first two Wallace and Gromit shorts on the way down, during which time we took a bit of a wrong turn and ended up having to cut across back country roads to get back on course.

( Meadows family Christmas (observed), and a new laptop )

Now it's time to close this entry and get to bed. Tomorrow I will be going out and about, including stopping by a coffeehouse or two to try out this new laptop on their wifi.

I still can't believe it's mine. This is one of the best Christmas presents I've ever gotten.

"THINGS CAN GO WRONG, FAST...

...Maybe some dude from youth group talked you into boosting a case of motor oil, but now your cousin is dead in a swamp and you killed him. Maybe you and your girlfriend figured you could scare your wife into a divorce, but things went pear-shaped and now a gang of cranked-up Mexicans with latex gloves and a pit bull are looking for you.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong - inspired by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You'll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won't go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably all go south in a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.

Fiasco is a GM-less game for 3-5 players, designed to be played in a few hours with six-sided dice and no preparation. During a game you will engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. It's like making your own Coen brothers movie, in about the same amount of time it'd take to watch one."

Comes out 1/25/10, $25 or $20 as a preorder.

That sounds like fun, and I recognize that my definition of fun is often not the same as other peoples.

Best climbing night ever, more or less. There's a new nice little flaggy 5.7- or so that's all just elegant and flowing, which I liked so much I climbed it twice as a warmup, and then after that I sent my project 5.8 on the skywall. Yeah baby. (buymeaclue, the one I was sailing off of so spectacularly on Sunday.) There was falling, and dogging on the rope, and it is so overhung that The Jeff had to tow me back up to it with a second top rope, but--

Well, I had told myself I was getting two holds higher than I did before, which was four holds higher than I got on Sunday, and then I managed that and felt good, so I got one more higher, and tried for the next and came off--but by then I could see how to get to the hold after that, so I got towed back to the wall and made it up a few more--reader, I used a heel-hook, and it worked--first time in my climbing career--and then came off again. And got back on and came off one more time but by then I was one hold from the top and I was going to finish it if it killed me.

It didn't kill me. Clipping the quickdraw on the way down, on the other hand, very nearly did. I was amazed at how strong and balanced I felt for parts of the climb, and how easily I made some moves that felt absolutely terrifying.

By then, I had given myself a coughing fit from the sheer anaerobic output required, which persisted (off and on) until I got some hand got some mint tea with honey in me.

But I did also climb a new 5.9 (balancy, on an arrete, and I was actually quite surprised at how secure some of the very sketchy moves felt), and then I climbed and downclimbed an old standby 5.6 and finished off on another easy one on the skywall.

I am totally psyched. I feel like I may have actually learned something. Maybe I am finally starting to learn to climb.

With a little luck, I'll be able to drop some weight this winter, which will make those pesky overhangs much, much less miserable. (It's amazing how much you can feel any given five pounds when you are hauling it up twenty feet of overhang.)

Also, two cute boys hugged me as I was leaving. All in all, a banner day.

Alas! It was good to have her around and providing Essence to the Impufanite.

Ze spouse loaded my LA document (the 125K word one) onto his iPhone and has found... a misplaced " mark. But he can't remember where it was, and I can't find it to fix it. (He's about to try to whittle things down by searching the original doc...)


INwatch: Core Rules: 446, Lilith: 379, Eli: 359, Liber Umbrarum: 224, Litheroy: 217, Asmodeus: 191, Infernal Player's Guide: 123, GURPS In Nomine: 82, Zadkiel: 72 (no change for 2 days), Liber Canticorum: 29, Game Master's Guide: 20.
Adventures: City On Fire: 116, Strange Bedfellows: 93, Feast of Blades: 92, The Rats' Revenge: 86.
Free Adventures: A Very Nybbas Christmas: 4132, The Sorcerer's Impediments: 2692.
Not IN: Sahudese Fire Drill: 77, GURPS IOU: 62, GURPS Classic All-Star Jam 2004: 61 (fell off the bottom). Not IN or mine: Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and RPG: 229.


( Dragons under fold )

Now that airlines are turning into traveling sensory deprivation containers, I suggest the following plan for people who don't trust airline baggage handling for their personal kit: internet accessible, short-term P.O. boxes in major cities.

Say you're going to NYC, but you don't want to risk your iPod. Go online, rent a P.O. Box for a couple of days. Then overnight your iPod to your box, with online tracking. When you get to NYC, pick up your package. When you're ready to go home, mail it back to yourself.

This is embarrassing.

Remember the other day when I said I had enough Imaginext parts? Well, I do. It turns out when I said that, I'd forgotten I'd bid on an eBay lot of parts. A day after that pronouncement, I received an email telling me I'd won the bid.

The box arrived today, which increased my collection by at least 50%.

I'm going to keep my mouth shut next time.

( No new comics shipped to my store, so I reviewed a GN I got for Christmas, and an online comic. )

   Dave Van Domelen, "Without language or thought, how can you understand ANYTHING?" "Who knows. Maybe by whistling? -KHT.- -PHT.- It's too cold for whistling, Russell." - Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logicomix

Karl Rove, who's been outspoken on the sanctity of marriage and the threat gay marriage poses to it, has been granted his second divorce.

But, see, gays getting married will devalue the institution. Nevermind the fact Jesus was pretty outspoken about his dislike of divorce.

Oh, silly me! I forgot - it only applies to OTHER people.

Ganked from flemco

Not the game

We just had a 5.9 earthquake about 8 to 10 miles away from my hometown, with a 4.9 aftershock! And CA Earthquakes had the gall to call them "light and moderate". SCREW YOU, come down here, experience those quakes, and SAY THAT TO MY FACE.

AGH. The phones are dead, but the internets (DSL) are not. I'm pretty sure mom's going crazy right now 'cause she can't reach me. @)#)$&@#$)&#@

Let's hope that's the last of it...

Happy birthday to sonoffletch! I doubt he'll see this, but I hope the world is still treating you well, man.

It's the end of December, which means its nearly New Year's, which means it's time for the Inauthentic Medivnyk recipe one more time.

Happy Holidays!

(Guess what I making today?)

Ukrainian Christmas Cake (sorta)

(Other versions are less fluffy, do not have the yeast, do not have the sour cream/yogurt, do not have the sugar, are less labor-intensive, add fruit or nuts....)

Ingredients:
1 pkg. dry granular yeast
3 tbsp. lukewarm water
1 cup honey (dark buckwheat honey is preferable)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup sour cream (I use whole milk yogurt)
1/2 cup butter
4 eggs separated
3 cups sifted flour (I use half whole wheat and half unbleached)
2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp. ground cloves
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp. salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Grease your pan--rectangular cake pan or loaf pan(s).

Proof the yeast. Bring the honey to a boil and cool it slightly. The honey should be warm.

Cream the butter and sugar together with a hand-held mixer until light and creamy. Add egg yolks, one at a time, and continue to beat until all is incorporated, then add the honey and sour cream and continue to mix. Add the yeast to the resultant batter; it's mostly for flavor. *g*

Beat the eggs whites to stiff peak. Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and salt. Fold the flour mixture and the egg whites, alternating, into the cake batter as gently as possible so you do not lose the loft of the meringue.

Slide the batter into the prepared loaf pans. Bake for 45 minutes-1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Give it a little while to set up, then invert pans on wire racks to remove cake and cool. But not too much; it's best warm.

---

And now I really want to make piroshkis.

But neither they nor medivnyk are really On The Discipline, now are they? And I am, again.

La.

---

ETA: CAKE IS DONE!