ceb's Big Log

A year and a half late, but here we go.

damerell and I make a Christmas cake every year, following damerell's family's traditional Christmas cake recipe, and have quite a lot of fun decorating it, usually with lego. Now the oddity with this recipe is that damerell's parents are tee-total, so while the cake mix contains some alcohol, the recipe notably does not include feeding the cake post-baking. This is, of course, Wrong. Sooo the theme of 2016's Christmas cake was "ceb proves to damerell that we should feed the cake", which obviously necessitated making a fed cake and a control, non-fed cake.

There is a glaringly obvious lego opportunity here, which we would have been remiss not to take advantage of. In 17-umpty-mumble, William Hogarth produced a couple of etchings in support of the idea that the demon drink (specifically, gin) was the root cause of all society's ailments. These were called Beer Street and Gin Lane, and there is an informative wikipedia article about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane

Observe: Beer Street



and Gin Lane:



Let me unpack these for you... ( details beneath )

From rmc28

Let's start 2017 off in a positive way with a Pay It Forward meme. The first 6[*] people to comment (and more if I can manage it) will receive a surprise from me at some point in 2017 - anything from a book, a ticket, something home-grown or made, a postcard, absolutely any surprise! it will happen when the mood comes over me and I find something that I believe would suit you and make you happy.

(If you don't like surprises and would rather have something off a wishlist and/or some warning, let me know in your comment. The goal is to make you happy.)

If you can, post this in your own journal and pay it forward. Let's do more kind and loving things for each other in 2017, without any reason other than to make each other smile and show that we think of each other.

[*] NB This is cross-posted to LJ and I probably can't manage 6 for each site! I'll see what I can do.

I love traditions, presents, surprises, and endless series of small things, so I am precisely the target market for advent calendars. This year I bought a DIY one (which looks like a stack of presents - no photos as I've not found time to paint it and so it is still MDF-coloured). This fails somewhat on the surprise front, natch, but I failed to find any better ideas until December 1st. (Relatedly, if I'm feeling rich next year I am importing a posh liquorice calendar from Denmark.)

I also like the December Days posts that ghoti and nanila and others are doing, and was thinking about joining in. I've not been organised enough to solicit requests but I did think up some ideas for post subjects. So each box in my advent calendar has pieces of paper with (1) a nice thing to do (2) a thing to post about and, because I'm me, (3) a useful thing to do. I printed them off and shuffled them so it'll be as surprising as I can get with the available resources.

More advent-related things which you should really go and look at:

http://the-toast.net/2015/12/02/your-2015-advent-calendar/
A sinister Advent story by Mallory Ortberg.

http://nanila.dreamwidth.org/1000112.html
Ludicrously camp Playmobil advent calendar reimagined as a nativity scene. (Nanila is a talented photographer and is posting a photo a day for advent. This was in response to my prompt and is in the running for best Christmas present :-)

So, last year I wanted to achieve a smaller to-read pile. I started at about 170 books. Now (having just done the post-Christmas cataloguing) I have 203. Part of this is down to changing how I catalogue mid-year, to put everything borrowed onto my to-do list so that I don't lose track of it. But in summary, hm. I shall have another go in 2011.

Here is what I read in 2010 (83 books): http://qec.dreamwidth.org/513.html

and here is my 2011 list: http://qec.dreamwidth.org/25968.html

I also invented a cunning wheeze, viz. if I can't work out what to read next, I grep all the unread books out of my catalogue and pick a random number to decide which to read. This is helping my to-read pile un-stagnate. Random numbers can be ordered here: http://www.random.org/integers/ - get yours today!

New Year (as in, 1st January) always makes me grumpy, I'm not sure why. These past few years I have been defining 31st January to be New Year instead, it has a much better ritual. Book reading goals still follow the Gregorian calendar, however.

With bats!

( gingerbread tree )

I started this: qec, and it has largely worked, so I shall continue.

Also I started this: books, and have read 100 books since the start of 2008. By my own admission, about 1/3 of them "don't really count" for some reason, so I think this year I shall see whether I can get to 100 without cheating. Well, without cheating in the same way; I'm going to start my list now, thus extending the year a little.

I made this part-way through the year: things made, and will (a) keep it properly this year rather than starting it in September and probably forgetting a bunch of stuff (b) fill it in with links/photos where possible.

Also, beer, we've got a beer cellar now, with 2007 and 2008 beer in it (not underground, this is Cambridge after all, but it does have spiders).

In other news, gingerbread dough is very tasty.

Yes I know it's not new year yet.

Go to at least two interesting things/places a month and write them up dammit. With a pre-resolution to write up the four or five things I've been behind on for ages...

*Where* have I put my 2007 diary?