The Desert Mermaid

For some years now the administrators at the hospital where Dad works have been boldly leading the way to the future, except that the future they're envisioning appears to be of the corporate-run bottom-line-obsessed 80s-movie dystopia variety. It's been rather rough on any of the doctors who, like Dad, believe that the point of medicine is healing.

So Dad, who has also spent a decade studying an awesome state-of-the-edge cutting-art method of surgery that uses better equipment, makes smaller incisions, and offers faster healing times, is underappreciated and shunned because he feels that surgery is supposed to help optimize a patient's healing, rather than to make piles of money for him and all the hospital people around him. It's made for a pretty oppressive atmosphere, and Dad was getting to the point where he wasn't sure how he could keep this up--but he wasn't sure how he could quit, either, because there wasn't much in the retirement jar.

And then in August his best buddy from way back in residency called him and was all, "Hey, wanna job?"

Good GOD, y'all. THIS JOB. The hospital is GREAT and all the doctors like Dad a lot and he wouldn't be running his own business and maybe now we can pay off our loans and they actually are excited about his amazing Jetsonian Spacefuture surgery techniques. I mean, like, REALLY excited. He went out to kind of look things over and every time he blinked they'd throw more perks at him. He was about half an hour away from owning everyone's firstborn child.

It looks almost perfect. There's only one downside.

It's in Illinois.

Yeah, we're Westerners. It's difficult to imagine living anywhere else than Out West somewhere. But hey, everything else is awesome, and the hospital here is sinking fast, so by god, Dad's taking the job. He and Mom are moving to Illinois in the spring. They'll be there anywhere from two to ten years.

And I'm staying here.

So this is gonna be extremely weird. We're keeping the house, and I'm staying in it. Probably my brother will be moving in with me, too, since he's trying to get a job out thisaway.* And it's especially weird to think that I'll be emerging from my Bat Cave to become the one running the house. Fun, but weird.

We've been putting off announcing it until everything was all put together, but we've been preparing since August. Mom's gone all manic about moving, and Dad's kind of in a daze, and our employees are figuring out their next steps, and all the patients are wailing and moaning. (Dad is not popular with the administration, but god damn his patients love him. And the hospital staff all go to him if they have problems, so there's that.) And I'm plotting to steal the master bedroom (to Dad's horror) and wondering how I'll buy groceries with the twelve pennies or so I make a week at the Space Place.

Life, man. You never know what it's gonna throw at you next. We'll see where this takes us.


*Which is going to be interesting when he brings his silly cat with him. Harley is a lot like the late sister of our current old geezer cat, Fern, and though said sister Charlotte got ate by a mountain lion a while back, Fern still seems paranoid that she will return someday. If Harley shows up, it'll only confirm that she was right all along.

Gonna do my first live dome show tomorrow. Wish me luck!

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• The Cooking Hypothesis suggests that the invention of cooking precipitated a rapid evolutionary change in humans, allowing them to more efficiently process nutrients and, of course, growing bigger brains. I always said cooking was an important part of humanity, dangit!


• Nancy Kerrigan was filmed right after being attacked sobbing and asking "Why? Why?"--and a lot of people thought she was being a wimp or a drama queen because she was only bruised. Dude, it still hurts, but quite apart from that, when you get attacked, it's probably TERRIFYING and it HURTS YOUR FEELINGS.


• The difference between triple axels, triple spins, triple lutzes, etc., has to do with where you push off from and what direction you're facing and okay fine I've already forgotten.


• Flavoring sodas is a lot like brewing tea. Really sugary tea.


• But brown sugar makes them taste rather bitter.


• Also, soda-brewing is similar to making beer, except you don't let the yeast go far enough to make alcohol.


• Furthermore, there is a lot of argument over just what the "cream" in "cream soda" refers to. Vanilla? Adding cream to the soda? Or cream of tartar? It's a HISTORY MYSTERY.


• In tangentially-related soda discoveries, SodaStream is a company fraught with political tensions and controversy.


• Cloth pads and panty liners are surprisingly expensive, but also surprisingly worth it.


• There is a constellation in the Southern Hemisphere called "The Poop." Yes, it refers to a ship's stern (poop deck), BUT STILL. HURRRR.


• There are, naturally, all sorts of recipes for Ent-Draught on the internet.


• Mainlining Atop The Fourth Wall has taught me something I always rather thought: I have terrible comic-reading comprehension. I do okay with some, mostly in comic strip form, but it takes me a long time to parse each page, way longer than it takes to read straight prose, so if I'm going to read a comic, I have to be committed. And even then I have trouble regarding them critically.*


• I did learn, however, that lots of people find it extremely difficult to keep comic continuity straight. Comic writers, for instance. Case in point: Donna Troy.


• The director of Tremors is Ron Underwood, who got his start in the film industry making educational shorts for Barr Films--such as one of my favorite Rifftrax-featured shorts, Library World.


• My mom, who watched very little TV as a kid, nevertheless has strong opinions about what Mr. Peabody's voice sounds like.


• Mork & Mindy was a spinoff of Happy Days.  Clearly, I never watched either of them.


• Getting feedback on your novel can be a mixed bag. You get excited that you can make it better, but frustrated when you can't tell if the feedback makes sense.


• Publishing a serial story online gets more difficult with each installment because there's a lot to keep track of. BUT DAMMIT IT'S STILL POSSIBLE.


• You can unclog standard drain clogs with the use of science fair volcano technology.


• After you turn into the left-turn-lane, it's legal to drive 500 freaking feet in that lane. Which is almost a whole block even here in Salt Lake City.


• The Beautiful Creatures movie might be adapted from a novel of the same name, but don't let that fool you. It is clearly a remake of The Touch of Satan.


• The first female-directed movie ever to gross more than $1 billion is Frozen. Which is awesome, but dang, it took a while to get there. Let's hope this is a good precedent!

*Interestingly, though, I read a lot of Archie comics as a kid. It fascinated me the same way 1950s Educational Shorts fascinate me--it shows some weird whitebread cultural ideal that somehow I can't look away from.

So the current homemade soda scores are as follows:

Extracts

1 flatass root beer
1 fairly passable ginger ale
1 delicious cream soda

Scratch

1 awesome ginger ale with lemon
1 flatass root beer
1 attempt at root beer with vanilla and brown sugar in which I seem to have accidentally made ACTUAL beer instead
1 birch beer attempt that somehow became Ent-draught NO SERIOUSLY HOW DID I DO THAT*
1 pretty darn good three-root root beer that tastes very licorice-y

I think the brown sugar is out. The two I made with it--the birch beer and the root beer--are kind of bitter. White sugar seems to make it more soda-ish. I'm gonna try another straight root beer now that I've gotten the hang of actual carbonation, and try the birch beer again with white sugar and a lot less birch.

I also want to try cream soda from scratch, but I have to get hold of some cream of tartar first. And I'm starting to think about figuring out my own recipes. I'm thinking I could do a lot with tea blends, because OF COURSE I AM. Come on, though--how can you not agree that an Earl Grey Cream Soda could be completely awesome if I figured out how to do it right?

And even if I never figure that out, it's nice to know that those frosted soda mugs we've kept in the freezer for years are finally earning their keep.


Bonus Points: Was willing to bet my pants there was an actual Ent-draught recipe on Google. There are about 2.36 million reasons why I get to keep my pants.



*The weirdest part is that I've drunk several bottles and still can't tell if I like it. "This is too beery," I think. "But it's also refreshing. But the aftertaste is bitter. But it's also kind of got some mentholish flavor that's rather intriguing. But maybe it'll resolve if I take another sip." And over it all is "This tastes like I'm drinking a goddamn FOREST."

Tried to make some of Grandma's Fairy Soup* tonight. Not bad stuff, but I have got to learn how to cook squash longer. (It didn't help that Mom was hungry and kept demanding to know if it was soup yet every few minutes.) It always comes out a little too crunchy, which isn't how you want your squash.

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Also, it occurs to me that now that Mom's got a soda charger, I can try to bust out some pretty excellent Chateau Romani. I still think that fermentation is more fun than using the soda charger, but fermenting is a bad idea whe milk is involved, so in this case we'll just roll with it.

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Speaking of geeky chefs, acrossthelake came by tonight to politely try some of my soup, and then we traded TV shows! I'm evangelizing Fringe to her--aw, man, watching the first season is a lot like hanging out with my old buddies--and she showed me the pilot of American Horror Story, which appears to be a show rooted firmly in the Unlikable People Making Bad Decisions genre.** I may have to keep going on it just to see what the hell kind of genre it's actually going for. But hey, no matter what it's good to be watching Fringe again. And even better to be hanging out with my friend again!


*So-called by myself and my siblings because in the Wind Waker game your Grandma makes the soup for you after you give her a fairy. I'm sure they didn't mean that she made the soup out of the fairy, but well ...

**Also it seems that its opening title music is played largely by those springy things on the bottom corners of doors that are supposed to keep the door from banging into the wall. An interesting choice.

My sister says she loves the way I collect hobbies. I got a new one for Xmas, too! Dad was having so much fun making wine that I decided I wanted to have some fun too, of the nonalcoholic kind.

So I got me some soda-brewing stuff!

Mostly I got it on the principle of Why The Hell Not. Brewing always seemed like it'd be a lot of fun, but you may remember that I am not terribly fond of alcohol, what with the way it mixes with my Fukitol and makes me fall down.* Plus, I always wanted to see for myself how you get the bubbles into the soda. (I can't have been the only kid who wondered this.)

So I have been testing it out! So far I have only been working with the ready-made extracts of ginger and sarsaparilla** and such, because they're quick to make and it's less disappointing to fuck 'em up. And since I'm just starting, I'm fucking up some, though I think I'm doing it on a precisely calibrated learning curve. The mixtures seem okay, but I am not getting the carbonation I want from it. Partly that's because I have yet to form any frame of reference for how carbonated to get it, and partly it's because, as I realized only after I had started to bottle the first batch, that I have one rather awkward hangup that might become a liability to this hobby: I am terrified of balloons.

No, really. I have no idea why, of all the traumatic events in my life, a half-remembered, possibly unreal incident would be the one to burn its way into my autonomic nervous systerm. That terrible car crash when I was six? Eh. The time I had the police looking for me and failed at Stranger Danger? Traumatically embarrassing, but hey, I was seven and anyway it all turned out fine. The day I watched Dad staple Mom's big scary head wound back together? I thought that was pretty entertaining. But ONE ill-advised attempt to carry a balloon in my teeth at age two, and ever after that I'm doomed to have physical anxiety attacks around the stupid things.

And, as it turns out, my fear of loud pressurized bangs extends to the possibility of exploding soda bottles. (Especially the plastic ones--for some reason I'm LESS afraid of shards of glass erupting all over the place, because this is not a rational fear. But I don't have any glass bottles. Yet.) So I've been extremely conservative about when to turn off the yeast, which has so far resulted in undercarbonated beverages. (Mom pronounces them to be just fine, but since Mom likes lukewarm flat soda, that means I've got a long way to go.)

But! I'm continuing on, because learning through experimentation is FUN, (like I did with pizza!) and anyway soda is delicious. I've ordered some more complicated ingredients to try when I get this carbonation thing figured out, and now that my sister has left again, we can use her bathtub to store the bottles so that if they DO explode, they will be 1) contained, and 2) upstairs, far away from my Bat Cave, where they will only scare OTHER members of the family. This is an improvement.

Anyway, I'll let you guys know how it goes! And if you hear loud bangs from my house, don't worry. It's just exploding sody pop.


*This is a handy excuse, but the truth is I just don't like alcohol very much.

**One problem with this hobby is that I really hate the words "sarsaparilla" and "sassafras." What the hell, Spanish? Why you gotta make it sound like people's mouths are full of marbles? Maybe I can start referring to the sassafras as saxifrage, because that's slightly less annoying to say and also reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's fun character Sax Russell.

This year Dad’s vineyard produced some actual grapes! It wasn’t a lot (Dad later realized that he technically should not have any grapes, since in the second year you’re supposed to prune ‘em off to give them energy to grow. But hey—grapes!) Over the past few weeks, Dad had been using his refractometer to try to judge the sugar level in the fruits to see when he should harvest. He’d stand around squinting into the thing and screw up his whole face like some sea captain contemplating distant ships.

ME: ARRR, the white whale! Avast, there, matey! Be the grapes ready fer the harrrrvest?
DAD: I have no idea! HOW IS THIS THING SUPPOSED TO WORK WHEN IT’S CLOUDY?

( Alfred Hitchcock's The Grapes of Wrath )

So I just bought myself a pair of roller skates. Because, you know, you only live once.

Although conceivably you also live a lot longer if you don't decide it'd be a great idea to remove any possible traction keeping your head from slamming into the ground. I don't really understand the YOLO sentiment, is what I'm sayin'.

Now to go find a place where I can make a fool of myself in private until I get this somewhat figured out.

So I did, in fact, start my internship this weekend.

Somehow my job description of Creating A Database Of Museum Outreach Contacts manifested itself as Explaining How Monarch Butterflies and Viceroy Butterflies Employ Mimicry To Hordes Of Adorable Girl Scouts.

... Yeah, I have even less idea what I am doing than I did earlier this week. But hey, I got to meet some extremely dedicated eight-year-old scientists, so that was fun.

I have learned how to deep fry beer-battered chicken.


Thanks, XKCD!

Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what it's like.