Strawberries were on sale, and I’m a sucker for trying to use seasonal fruit, but strawberry usually means pie not cake, which, by extension requires crust. I suck at crusts, every attempt I’ve made to fabricate one from close to scratch has exploded or turned into some terrible dessert matzo and today was no exception. Starting with a biscuit-style crust recipe I mixed and pushed and pulled and did so apparently to sufficient excess that I created a giant… biscuit. I split that with my house mate. My next attempt was to use a doughier option but failed to properly dock the crust and got a biscuit pita. This I split with my dad. My final attempt involved using the Safeway Brand roll-out pie crusts. I rolled, I docked, I curled, I crimped, I took a call and I burned it. This I gave to Max. Nabisco 4 – Terry 0.
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Me: Hey, do you want to come over and build your EDH deck? Hm… I’d failed to run a 5-Color event for 3 months and snuck one in today. The time between announcement and event was about a week so I didn’t feel bad when 6 people canceled due to work and we had event participation of 6. The deck I had built for the day quite simply blew as it was a case of what I call reactionary differentiation in trying to build a new deck. I’d made a card choice, realize it made the deck closer to a deck I was trying to avoid building and would add the opposite. This process happened between 8 and 12 times resulting in an unwieldy deck that did nothing particularly well. I scraped through three matches winning two largely by non-core win conditions in the deck. I sucked. I didn’t play much Magic over the summer. I didn’t play much Magic over the spring. I didn’t play much Magic over the Winter. I detect a trend. The redeeming aspect of the event was going out to eat with Mike Noble where we coined a phenomenon for something I’ve been doing more and more often: conceptual name dropping. Looking over my recent media posts I’ve used phrases like Buridan’s Ass, Morton’s Fork, Hobson’s Choice, File Drawer Effect, Euthypro dilemma, and Russell’s Teapot a lot. I think there’s a power to having a name for a phenomenon such that I found I got more traction if I said someone was falling for the Perfect solution fallacy rather than saying “you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect”. I’m glad I have a slightly mocking name for this tendency. Every OA auction I do comes with a standard boat of personal terrors as, while I do research on each item with the assistance of some long-memoried fellows I still have a largely extemporaneous style that can theoretically get me into trouble. I’m terrified of a Freudian slip or two words coming too close together and forming an ethnic slur and a dedicated team of braincells scan for such things. A second set of fears is picking a bad minimum bid. $3 is cheap, $5 is normal, $8 is special, $20 is expensive/established price and I refuse to reduce the starting price once announced. If I miss, I miss. Bids were sluggish so I moved to a popular item, a grab mug. I raised it stating the opening bid at $5. Only one person bid and it sold for $5. Historically, this means nothing as grab mugs were once sold at a fixed price of $3 consisting of a $1 mug and two or three $0.50 to $1.00 patches, but I’m somewhat proud of getting $12-$18 for these so $5 represented a crisis of confidence. I was a bit shaken but moved on eventually returning to another mug. This time, I did exactly what I did last time but mentioned that the mug was rare in that it had a blue fleur-de-lis but was a Boy Scout mug. Hands shot up and I was redeemed. As time moves on, new people in Scout seem weirder and weirder. I arrived at Ockanickon shortly after 5 PM to a largely empty parking lot except for the minivan next to me. They had the windows down and were talking about the weekend. Me: Can I help you? When I have a week or two without an event at a specific time, my sleep schedule tends to drift into something like a 26-hour day with between 8-10 hours of sleep. Now that camp was over and no fixed-time Scouting events I had drifted into going to bed around noon and waking up at 8 PM or so but needed to reset to normal hours to prepare for the work weekend. There are two ways I’ve found of getting back: Stay up late, or sleep a while. So, I got up early at 5 PM, fed the animals and steled myself for my long day of trying to stay awake until 6 the next day. I sorted cards, read, did some errands and did well until about noon when I dozed off in my chair. I snapped out of it a few minutes later and felt like I was entering the home stretch until I woke up again… in my bed… at 8 PM. I blame sleep faeries. I stopped by Tamanend Park to pick up a usage form for the Webelos Weekend. Many Scout organizations use the park but, in the park’s head, it seemed like there was only one. Me: Hi, ma’am. I’m Terry with Playwicki District and I was told to come by and fill out a usage form. As a child, I was always told that Genuardis, a local grocery chain, was owned by the mob as a front and it explained much. They had ridiculous hours of 5 AM to midnight and no one was ever there before seven or after 11 and I assumed they stayed open so people could drop protection money or some other such shenanigans. Their store brand was amazing as I think it was a way to launder money by opening bags of Chips Ahoy! and repackaging them giving you three or four money trails to then follow. Over the years they went legit and were bought out by Safeway and store I knew and loved was gone forever. The private label went down to store brand quality and today I sat around for 20 minutes waiting for them to open as their store hours were now 7 to 11. This also meant I could no longer have my biweekly commune with the stock-people by food-shopping near midnight. I normally have no strong preference for the local and was fine when B&N took out a local bookseller but I miss my old grocery store. I’m just not going to be comfortable going to a store with full knowledge that a kid that steals cigarettes will be met by the cops rather than a hirsute Italian man in a 3-piece suit. I had the day blocked off as “sort Magic cards”. Normally, I’d start with some studying but I guessed that it’d take about 14 hours to sort all my cards and was willing to trade some study time for the finality of having everything in its place by the end of the day. I started at about 4 AM with a grand basic sort that involves the following piles in order of deference:
These piles then get broken down by color and set and in the case of rares are sieved into bulk piles if I have more than 5 of a “bad” rare or sieved into bulk piles if it’s an uncommon that I have more than 4, 8, or 12 of, depending on how usable I think the card is. At around 5 I’d been sorting for 10 hours once you account for my lunch break and I started to see things. I’d see a foil flash by to not find it on a recheck or see some valuable card in the wrong pile, the hardest part was doing foreign cards as these were identified most viscerally and most prone to error. At one point I thought a card in some Asian language that I somehow “knew” meant “PENISTOWN”. I indulged myself and went back to find this:
Good news: My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Bad news: I have what I think is a Japanese Ghost Town with the word “Penis Town” written across it. |
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