Recipe: Dairy-Free Raspberry Almond Muffins
Dec. 21st, 2025 12:05 pmIngredients:
145 g tapioca starch
72 g sorghum flour
72 g millet flour
170 g granulated sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp xanthan gum
1/4 tsp fine salt
160 g non-dairy milk (175 ml)
150 g non-dairy yogurt (5.3 oz)
100 g neutral oil (1/2 cup)
2 large eggs (~100 g out of shell)
1/4 tsp almond extract
215 g fresh raspberries, rinsed and drained
( recipe )
Questions? Ask 'em!
Book #101 of 2025: The Tiger and the Wolf | #102: Another DCC book
Dec. 21st, 2025 06:18 pm
The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Quick synopsis: Set in a world where people can shapeshift into an animal, Maniye is on the run from her father (chief of the Wolf clan) and mother's clan (the Tiger clan).
Brief opinion: This is one of those books that was so good I gave myself eye strain because I couldn't stop reading it. How is Tchaikovsky even such a good author?
Plot: Set in a fantasy world with no technology at all (iron is only able to be worked by one clan, all others use bronze/stone/bone), all people have an animal they can shift into. (The story calls it Stepping. You Step to animal form and then Step back to human.)
The Wolf clan is not a great place to live. (It seemed to be based on viking stuff, so life was pretty brutal there if you were anything but a strong man.) Maniye, the product of rape of the captured Tiger queen by the Wolf chief, has two souls -- she can Step into Wolf or Tiger form. That is not something a person can deal with long term, the two souls will fight and rip the human apart from the inside.
Because her father wants to use her against the Tigers, Maniye flees the Wolf clan. As she runs, she meets traders from the Horse clan, a Snake priest (I loved his character!), a lone Wolf, a Hyena woman, and others.
The conclusion of the story was a mix of action (a big battle) and internal spiritual stuff.
Writing/editing: Both were nearly perfect.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: It's so rare that I can say there was nothing I didn't like about this story. I loved the worldbuilding, I love the idea of having an animal soul you can become, loved all the characters (especially the Snake priest). Loved everything!
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️- Loved.
---
Book #102: A re-listen of Dungeon Crawler Card book #5: The Butcher's Masquerade. For the coming year I need to figure out what to do about audiobooks. I guess it's fair to count them, but it feels a little like cheating because I'm not reading them at all. (I know that's a me-problem, some people only use audiobooks and no text books at all.)
I was today years old
Dec. 21st, 2025 11:02 amThis Week's SF news
Dec. 21st, 2025 09:40 amThe Compleat Enchanter (Incomplete Enchanter, volume 1) by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt
Dec. 21st, 2025 08:53 am
Harold Shea seeks escape from mundane life in tales of myth and magic.
The Compleat Enchanter (Incomplete Enchanter, volume 1) by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt
Sunday Word: Mephitic
Dec. 21st, 2025 11:41 ammephitic [muh-fit-ik]
adjective:
1 offensive to the smell
2 noxious; pestilential; poisonous
Examples:
Like a mephitic vapor from a sword-and-sandals epic, it slips under the door frame and into your head. (Guy Trebay, We’re Holding Tight to Our Good Luck Talismans, The New York Times, April 2020)
These moments of reckoning - in which something that once felt exciting begins to seem noxious, mephitic, dangerous - are important to heed. (Amanda Petrusich, A Quest to Rename the Williamsburg Bridge for Sonny Rollins, The New Yorker, April 2017)
The A66 motorway takes you along the bank of a river that eventually opens into the Cantabrian Sea, but there's no water to be seen through a mephitic landscape of factories and warehouses. (Paul Richardson, A great white hope in Avilés, Asturias, The Guardian, July 2011)
Mephitic vapors - spontaneous combustion - pressure of gases born of long decay - any one of numberless phenomena might be responsible. (H P Lovecraft, 'The Haunter of the Dark')
I even made them remove from the opening, as I smelled the mephitic air that issued abundantly from it, and began myself to feel giddiness in consequence of having gone too near; so that I was compelled to withdraw quickly, and inhale a purer air. (Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson)
Origin:
1620s, 'of poisonous smell, foul, noxious,' from Late Latin mephiticus, from Latin mephitis, mefitis 'noxious vapor, a pestilential exhalation, especially from the earth' (also personified as a goddess believed to have the power to avert it), an Italic word of uncertain origin. English use of mephitis is attested from 1706. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
More K-pop Christmas music!
Dec. 20th, 2025 10:45 pmNMIXX released a video containing both a holiday version of "Blue Valentine" (the same tune and lyrics, but with holiday-style backing music) and a rerecording of "Funky Glitter Christmas." Enjoy!
A couple of fun things to watch for:
- At about 1:38, Sullyoon comes out of a doll box, which is fun because people often say Sullyoon looks like a doll.
- At about 1:45, the toys have Lily tied to the floor, a la Gulliver's Travels.
2025 52 Card Project: Week 50: Celebrations
Dec. 20th, 2025 04:09 pmAs it was December 13, Santa Lucia Day, I also brought lussekatter, for us to have with our coffee as we baked. We spread the cookies out on a long table in my sister's living room. By taking up columns of cookies, we each had a nice mix.

M came along with Alona and Fiona, to the joy of all. Her first cookie baking!
Description: Background: a table covered with rows of Christmas cookies: bottom: a group of women smile at the camera. Top: three lussekatter

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
Saturday Word: Povitica
Dec. 20th, 2025 11:46 amPovitica (pronounced "poh-vee-TEET-sah" in Croatian, or "poh-TEET-sah" as potica in Slovenian) is a traditional Eastern European sweet or savory nut roll bread characterized by a very thin, yeast-raised dough.
A rich filling, usually finely ground walnuts, honey and/or sugar, is spread inside and then rolled into a tight spiral. Learn how to make it yourself below:
Staycation!
Dec. 19th, 2025 06:40 pmI have just borrowed Cahokia Jazz and a YA novel by EK Johnston from the library, so I'm set for that. And I'm meeting my oldest friend in the world in LA next month, so she can go to the desert for the first time, so we're sending each other links and stuff, and that's fun.
Tonight I will set up the batter for those insane Dark and Stormy cookies -- though I do them as bars, it's so much easier and the texture is more controllable -- and tomorrow I will make a crustless quiche for my BIL's birthday. Sunday is a cookie exchange, Monday is wrapping. It's gonna be a nice week, or it would be if not for all the rain.
Why did the rain wait until I was on vacation?
Happy holidays to y'all!
Recent reading
Dec. 19th, 2025 08:32 amIn other writing about writing, I received This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days by John Darnielle as an early birthday/Christmas gift - an illustrated, annotated collection of the Mountain Goats' lyrics - and, of course, immediately just skimmed it for my favorite songs, which quickly turned into reading random chunks because each "annotation" is a short paragraph, max - sometimes about the context for writing the song, or commentary on the characters/story, or what inspired it, or how people respond to it, or some observation/quote/etc. that is not obviously related to the song in any way - so once you've opened it to a specific page it's easy to just keep going for a while, and anyway, now I have to figure out to actually read this book. Just read it cover to cover? Listen to each song in the order they appear, and read the accompanying passage? (Which is a cool idea, but would take forever. Theoretically, I could do one song per day, devotional-style, but I know my attention span well enough to know that's not happening.)
Abeni and the Kingdom of Gold (Abeni’s Song, volume 2) by P. Djèlí Clark
Dec. 19th, 2025 06:42 am
In which history long forgotten is recovered.
Abeni and the Kingdom of Gold (Abeni’s Song, volume 2) by P. Djèlí Clark
Ads For Subs in the Suburbs
Dec. 18th, 2025 09:26 pm
Gosh, don't you just hate it
Dec. 19th, 2025 01:35 pmLast time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.
Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.
(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)
( Read more... )
chocolate
Dec. 18th, 2025 06:20 pmI took the bus to Brookline Village, walked a little extra because I was wrong about which bus stop to use, walked into the shop, and asked for a one-pound box.
I bought two vegan caramels, which Adrian had asked for; I'd have gotten more, but I wasn't sure what she or Cattitude think of sea salt caramel. Just for myself, I got six dairy truffles, three lemon and three lime. The rest was a few (vegan) chocolate creams, and a lot of chocolate-dipped fruit and nuts, including several of their excellent chocolate covered plums, a candy I haven't seen anywhere else.
I came home via Trader Joe's, where I bought fruit, a bell pepper, hummus, pre-cooked chicken sausages, a carton of chocolate ice cream, and a box of frozen vanilla and chocolate macarons.
Even counting the chocolate part of the groceries, I would have had money left from the $79 that happens to be how much cash is in my wallet right now. That's a pretty arbitrary metric, since I don't always have the same amount of cash (I do make a point of having some, because cash still comes in handy sometimes).
*see yesterday's post
Christmas music
Dec. 18th, 2025 04:51 pmLast night I discovered that Kiiras had released a Christmas song, called "Kiirasmas." I don't think I'd objectively say it's a good song, but it's still fun to listen to.
A few years ago, I did a K-pop Christmas song Advent calendar. This morning, as I added "Kiirasmas" to my K-pop Christmas playlist, I realized that if I wanted to post the whole playlist one song a day, I'd have had to start back on October 15! ^^
After having to spend 40 minutes listening to the store playing Christmas music while I waited for the pharmacy to fill a prescription. I'd like to say: No matter how Christmas-adjacent some of its lyrics may be, "My Favorite Things" is not a Christmas song. I'm willing to get seriously injured on this hill. However, if it means that I'll hear "The Christmas Song" less often, I'm willing to act like it's a Christmas song.
Cloud Carpets
Dec. 17th, 2025 09:23 pm
Last week while taking out the trash, I noticed that the clouds were low in the sky and really thick and ropey, like a plush carpet. Hurried home to grab the camera as sunset was coming soon and I wanted to be sure I caught the look.
( Read more... )
Job Search: Make No Assumptions
Dec. 17th, 2025 09:05 pmIn case anyone else asks: I skipped the Vulgarian's speech tonight. I have what's left of my own mental health to think of, for one thing. For another, if anything really important comes out of that rant, I'll hear about it from multiple, reliable sources over the next day anyway.
Anybody have any explanatory links?
Dec. 18th, 2025 04:09 pmThis most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"
But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.
It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.
The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.
I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.
Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.
Bundle of Holding: Tales of the Valiant
Dec. 17th, 2025 02:08 pm
The tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Kobold Press of high adventure in a Labyrinth of infinite worlds, and more.
Bundle of Holding: Tales of the Valiant
The price of postage
Dec. 17th, 2025 12:13 pmWhen I order things from Japan and Korea, my goal for managing postage costs is to have the postage cost less than the item, which I'm usually able to manage. Recently one of my friends sent me a package from within the US, for which the postage cost 3x the cost of the item!
inherited IRA, part I don't even know
Dec. 17th, 2025 11:37 amThe bit where the advisor told me to search for something on the website, and that led to an irrelevant form, was not encouraging--I think he overheard me saying to
Jonathan said this should take 1-2 business days at the BNY end, and that he'll let me know when the transfer has gone through.
I am not going to spend all my money on chocolate, probably not even all the money currently in my wallet, but it's tempting.
Micah Aaron Tajone Kalap Obituary
Dec. 17th, 2025 10:56 amMicah Aaron Tajone Kalap Obituary
As it happens, the bridge nearest the funeral home was just torn down. As a result, access looks like this...

(Buses are even worse)
Princess Jellyfish, volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura
Dec. 17th, 2025 09:11 am
Can a community of otaku save their apartment building from gentrification? Should a community of otaku save their apartment building from gentrification?
Princess Jellyfish, volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams
Dec. 16th, 2025 10:38 pm* I watched the delightful and sadly short-lived TV adaptation that shares a title and apparently little else, some years back, and definitely tried reading the book at some point after that, but it didn't take.
Tuesday word: Mistletoe
Dec. 16th, 2025 04:47 pmMistletoe (noun)
mis·tle·toe [mis-uhl-toh]
noun
1. a European plant, Viscum album, having yellowish flowers and white berries, growing parasitically on various trees, used in Christmas decorations.
2. any of several other related, similar plants, as Phoradendron serotinum, of the U.S.: the state flower of Oklahoma.
Origin: before 1000; Middle English mistelto, apparently back formation from Old English misteltān ( mistel mistletoe, basil + tān twig), the -n being taken as plural ending; cognate with Old Norse mistilteinn
Example Sentences
Christmas on the Farm at Underwood Family Farms in Moorpark includes visits with farm animals, tractor-drawn wagon rides, a mailbox for letters to Santa, and Christmas trees, wreaths, garlands and mistletoe for sale.
From Los Angeles Times
In the Dec. 21, 1918, issue of the Ohio State Journal, the state’s acting health commissioner cautioned people to "beware the mistletoe," recommending a "kissless holiday" for flu fighters.
From Fox News
If you don’t have someone to kiss under the mistletoe, or a friend or family to share the holidays with, have no fear — being alone doesn’t have to be lonely.
From Seattle Times
Bing Crosby — “White Christmas” Was Christmas even a thing before ol’ Binger hung the mistletoe?
From Seattle Times
Christmas on the Farm at Underwood Family Farms in Moorpark includes visits with farm animals, tractor-drawn wagon rides, a mailbox for letters to Santa and Christmas trees, wreaths, garlands and mistletoe for sale.
From Los Angeles Times
( bit of mistletoe trivia )
Murphy is busy
Dec. 16th, 2025 07:05 pmour microwave has twice quit, and then revived after poking and cussing
ordered a replacement microwave, which proved to be wired incorrectly
two GFI outlets in the kitchen (different circuit) tripped, and couldn't be reset, until 2 hours later when they could
Instant Pot overflowed the little drip cup and slopped broth all over the counter
I've spilled a 22 oz drink on carpet
I've spilled a small cup of sangria-- into my crochet bag
I broke a dulcimer string
my choir folder went walkabout, 24 hours before conducting a very complicated choir anthem (it's still missing)
Also I've got a Situation with a choir member.
Finally (I hope!) today it turned out that a fairly simple car repair will take two days, causing lots of complications because we're currently 3 people with 2 cars.
All this shortly before Christmas (and I have a wedding the Saturday after Christmas, and probably a funeral the next week)... I'm pretty much out of cope. But I picked hubby up from the car dealership, then took myself out for a comfort food lunch, and spent 4 hours at church catching up on things. Kid and I cooked a lovely dinner together (despite the unfortunate sangria), and now we're watching the new Benoit Blanc movie.
Five Books About Conversing With Animals
Dec. 16th, 2025 02:12 pmHow great would it be to talk with animals, through magic or technology or… whatever?
Five Books About Conversing With Animals
good things
Dec. 16th, 2025 01:30 pmI spent yesterday evening re-reading Helen Dewitt's The English Understand Wool, one of the best books I've read in the past few years, and reading T. Kingfisher's Snake-Eater, which I loved.
A friend is stopping by to keep me company while I make snickerdoodles, and this has prompted me to sweep and run the vacuum cleaner; this evening I will go to needlecrafting and there will be a colleague there.
Winds in the East...Mist Coming In... (Hugo Season Approaches)
Dec. 15th, 2025 09:54 pmWorldcon in 2026 will be in LA. If you'd like to nominate for the 2026 Hugo Award, you can do so by being a member of the Seattle Worldcon or purchasing at least a WSFS membership from LAcon V. There's a medium-length guide here on the whole process. Nomination is step one: Seattle and LA WSFS members build the short lists as a collective.
However! Even if you don't plan to become a member (the membership fee is $50 and times are hard), everyone can share the things they would nominate if they could via the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom, or make their own lists and post them on socials with the #HugoAward tag. Lots of people (it's me; I'm people) have gaps on their nomination forms and are looking for cool stuff to check out. Consider making a rec list/thread!
A disclaimer: the following are my personal nominations that I'll submit next year, not official Hugo finalists. I know the nominations/finalist language can be confusing. ( Read more... )
Monday Word: Thurible
Dec. 15th, 2025 06:22 pmnoun
a censer, specifically a metal censer suspended from chains, in which incense is burned during worship services
examples
1. Many looks were accessorized by personal fog machines, swung like ritual thuribles, emitting puffs of smoke into the air, blurring the edges. New York Times 2023 March 4 "The Brilliant Alchemy of Rick Owens"
2. Altar boys parade with palm fronds, a priest swings a thurible, a young woman joins her hands in prayer. Time. "Celebrating Faith in China’s Underground Churches" 28 March 2016
origin
Middle English thurribul, from Latin thuribulum, from thur-, thus incense, from Greek thyos incense, sacrifice, from thyein to sacrifice

Watched the weather report today.
Dec. 15th, 2025 04:08 pmAnd they just said that, with no commentary, like it's not absolutely bizarre to go from 19F - 56F within a single week in December.
And it's not just the high temperatures that are bizarre, the low ones are too. I can't speak to the decades before 1990, I guess, but NYC weather used to be temperate - we got more snow, but that's because the winter temperatures were in the snow range - close to the freezing point, not so warm it melted, not so cold that it just didn't happen.
Bundle of Holding: Traveller Explorations (from 2022) & Traveller Ancients
Dec. 15th, 2025 02:02 pm
The TRAVELLER 2022 UPDATE corebook, ALIENS guides, sector sourcebooks, and more.
Bundle of Holding: Traveller Explorations (from 2022)

A high-power 800-page adventure for Mongoose Traveller that uncovers the greatest mysteries of Charted Space
Bundle of Holding: Traveller Ancients
DNF: Heretical Fishing
Dec. 15th, 2025 04:50 pm
DNF #84. Usually I don't use this template for DNFs, but this book was so (overly) long, getting to the halfway point was basically a whole book.
Heretical Fishing by Haylock Jobson.
Quick synopsis: The richest man on Earth is killed and ends up in a video game where he is completely perfect, godlike, always correct, and better than any other person on that new planet. And yet they all love him/fear him.
Brief opinion: One of the two things that makes me drop a book right away is if the author describes overweight characters as "waddling". I was enjoying this story in the beginning enough that I overlooked "waddling" being used, but I really should have just DNFed it the first time it happened. The writing went so downhill from there.
Plot: The richest man on Earth gets hit by a truck and killed, and somehow ends up inside a videogame world (in LitRPG you never question that kind of thing). For some reason, even though the main character is really unlikable (he never tries to fit in, uses Earth slang that he knows no one will understand), everyone loves him off the bat.
He knows more than anyone else. He is stronger than anyone else. He is literally the most powerful, smartest, and most liked person in that world (yawn).
All he wants to do is fish, and yet even though fishing is the #1 worst thing a person can do in that world, everyone loves him and accepts that he fishes. For zero reason.
The only people who don't love him are fat and ugly people -- they fear him. (I don't know if the author has some kind of issues or is just a bad writer or both.) Fat people fear him, ugly people hate him.
Writing/editing: The book was edited well, I can give it that. The whole thing was 550+ pages, and in the half I read I didn't spot one editing issue.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Where do I even start. The ultra-perfect main character? The god awful descriptions of "fat" people? The annoying curses characters used (it was Mad Libs, like the author had three piles of words: A god's name, an adjective, and a body part. So he'd end up with curses like "Zeus's throbbing toe!" and "Hephaestus's glowing tongue!")?
While the typo-finding style of editing was good, this book was so incredibly long for zero reason. It could have easily had two-thirds of it cut and the "story" wouldn't have been impacted at all. (There was so little story. The main character fished and ate fish endlessly, adopted a crab and an otter. Farmers came to him for help. Everyone was his best friend.) An editor should have taken a hatchet to it and made a tighter book of it.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️ ¼ - Very strongly disliked. A quarter-star because I did like the story in the beginning, but by the first third of the book I downright hated it. For some reason I forced myself to keep going and hit about the halfway mark before DNFing it.
Clarke Award Finalists 2025
Dec. 15th, 2025 09:33 amWhich 2025 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
1 (3.8%)
Extremophile by Ian Green
0 (0.0%)
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
1 (3.8%)
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
17 (65.4%)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
15 (57.7%)
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf
0 (0.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2025 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
Extremophile by Ian Green
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf
Two buses canceled in a row
Dec. 15th, 2025 02:54 amChecking In - 14 Dec. 2025
Dec. 14th, 2025 10:19 pmA productive Sunday.
Nihotupu dam, early summer
Dec. 15th, 2025 01:42 pm( pics here )
Top 25 K-pop songs of 2025!
Dec. 14th, 2025 03:18 pmNME (which seems have a much better of understanding on K-pop than Rolling Stone) has released a list of the [top 25 K-pop songs of 2025]! I scrolled to it, sure that I would have forgotten a lot of songs from earlier in the year, and was pleasantly surprised to see there were some I hadn't heard before, so it was like an early birthday present from NME!
I was also looking to see if NMIXX made the list — I've loved their new songs, and I was hoping that other people appreciated them. I was happy to see NMIXX's "High Horse" ranked #7 — four places higher than Blackpink's "Jump" (which I thought was highly overrated and wouldn't have ranked so high had it been by someone other than Blackpink). I then kept scrolling and was pleased and surprised to see H1-Key's "Summer Was You" ranked #6. Then I kept scrolling and was absolutely gobsmacked to see Huntr/x's "Golden" ranked #2 — I expected it to take the top spot, and was extremely surprised to find it in #2! So what was #1? I had absolutely no idea. I scrolled and was surprised and overjoyed to find NMIXX's "Spinnin' on It" at #1!
(no subject)
Dec. 14th, 2025 04:38 pmOn my way out the door to a vigil for last night's mass casualty incident; today is also the thirteenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, and there was an antisemitic mass shooting in Bondi Beach, Australia yesterday.
I do not know how I am going to get through this vigil and come home and light my chanukiyah, with its engraving, More life. The great work begins.
ETA: Ran into some coworkers at the extremely well-attended vigil and they came home with me to light the chanukiyah, and that helped.
The sun's going down, so Happy Hanukkah pretty soon?
Dec. 14th, 2025 03:46 pmBut really, how do you spell it in English?
Also, please take a poem
Edit: Also, also, two videos
A different fic....
Dec. 17th, 2025 08:39 amOh, sweetie. That's... that's just not how cassette tapes work. Not even overseas. You fast forward or rewind - literally winding the tape again - and hope that your timing is amazing. I mean, with practice I guess you can get pretty good, but still.
( Read more... )
Product Review: Sweet Loren's Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough
Dec. 14th, 2025 10:37 amI found Sweet Loren's Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough in the dairy section at my local Kroger analogue, and after my recent success with Trader Joe's Super Chocolatey Gluten Free Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough, I was excited to branch out in the world of preproportioned cookie doughs.
Like TJ's, you get 12 pucks of cookie dough in a package and can bake on demand. It also says you can freeze the dough. I baked them straight out of the refrigerator for about 18 minutes, and got thin cookies about two inches across, with crispy edges and a chewy middle.
I found these odd. The cookie bit is weirdly grainy, like it has cornmeal in it. Maybe it's oat chunks. It also has a hearty flavor, probably again due to the oats and maybe the molasses. Kind of a homestyle vibe. The chocolate is very nice and kind of softens the cookie experience, but there isn't enough chocolate to make up for its grittyness or its unusual flavor.
These are vegan and soy free, though! And Sweet Loren's has more than a dozen different kinds of cookie doughs, though I think my store only had one or two.
Update: These are a lot different after they've cooled. My initial review was based on cookies that were about ten minutes out of the oven. Two days later, cookies from that same batch aren't as gritty and their flavor is less...bold.
Current Ingredients: Flour Blend (oat, tapioca, potato starch), Sugar, Palm Oil, Chocolate Chunks (sugar, unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter, vanilla, salt), Filtered Water, Molasses, Natural Flavors, Sea Salt, Baking Soda.



