Sushi Night!!

I've been wanting to put together a Relief Society cooking group for months. A week ago we finally did it. Yay for sushi rolling in my dining room! Look how much fun people had:



One person knew what she was doing. The rest of us just played around with seaweed, sushi rice, veggies, and bamboo roll-up thingies. We mostly stuck to California rolls so that we didn't have to risk some kind of weird food poisoning due to poor seafood handling. A few brave souls put smoked salmon or fake crab meat in their rolls, but mostly we did avocado, cucumber, and Daikon radish. The wasabi peanuts Jen brought weren't a hit with everyone. Some of us got a little addicted, though . . .

Don't these look pretty?

Look, a rare appearnce of ME on my own blog! My sushi rolls kept coming out square for some reason, but they still tasted good. The beautiful thing about sushi night: sushi's not so scary to make after all, and it's fun to cook with lots of people.

Next month: homemade pasta. Come learn with us!

Inefficiency Ramblings

First, check out this video: www.wimp.com/inefficientdrinker/

Once you've done that, the rest of this entry will make sense.

[Insert elevator muzak here]

Okay, done? When I first watched this video, I thought, "Man, what a funny/stupid cat! I can't believe it did that!" Then I started thinking some more. Uh oh. You know what happens when I start thinking more? I start drawing connections to my life. Yup.

So here's what I started asking myself: When do I do things in my life like the cat in this video? In other words, when do I get so bull-headedly sure that MY way is the best/smartest/most efficient way that I can't see that maybe my way ISN'T best?

Thinking, thinking.

Okay, pretty much all the time. Maybe not ALL the time. A lot of the time, though. I see a goal ahead, something I want, and think, "Okay, here's how I get there. Easy." In the process of getting there, I don't always choose the best way to reach the goal, though.

Example: Friday night was our ward autumn party/hayride at a farm about four miles out of town. The party started at 5:30. I had steel drum lessons until 6:45. I called a friend who was at said party to make sure it was still happening. Oh yeah, come on over. I'd forgotten, though, about the fact that it had been raining all day and that the road to the farm was unpaved. And narrow. And it was getting dark. The road ended up being washed out in places, full of puddles, and harder to navigate than usual. That combined with it essentially being a one-lane road presented problems. I should have just turned around at the first turn-out and gone home. But no, I bulled ahead, sure that despite the sudden return of a downpour, the party would still be happening. I ended up just blocking the way for lots of people trying to get home. And being cranky that I drove out there and everyone was leaving by the time I arrived. Plus getting lost on the way home. I was so focused on "I'm going to the party" that I ignored all the details that suggested going to the party wasn't such a good idea.

Not that the above event was a huge tragedy or anything, but it reminded me that I so often insist on MY way and MY schedule that I'm like the cat in the video, getting drenched and laying back my ears in discomfort while I keep sticking my head right under the faucet. I need to learn to wait a bit. I need to open myself up to alternative routes that might work better.

We Are the Knights Who Say Ni!!

Things I learned at the Renaissance Fair:

Two-year-olds wouldn't have been very good at defending the castle.

Attending the Fair in costume is a lot more fun. I need to make my own costume for next year. The ones they sell there are WAAAYY too expensive. (See? This is why you should learn to sew. You never know when you'll need a Renaissance outfit.)

History gets sanitized for the sake of pageantry. When they announced Henry VIII's royal court, they didn't say which wife this was. How many had already been beheaded by this point, huh, huh?

In staged jousts, the better horseman always plays the role of the bad guy. Here he is: the Italian champion who insisted on a joust to the death (which we didn't get to see because we had to go home). I guess I also learned that I gravitate towards the bad guy. Hmm.

The Renaissance Fair was a lot of fun. I also learned that a lot of people really have no concept of what Renaissance clothing looks like. I went to the fair on "Talk Like A Pirate Day," and there were TONS of pirates in the crowd. (I guess Sir Francis Bacon was kind of a pirate . . .) Really, this was kind of like a Trekkie convention except with older-looking clothing styles. It was an excuse for people to dress in costume. Lots of fairy wings for sale, along with elf ears and horns (hmm . . . what would Shakespeare have done with that?). I wanted to start quoting insults from Monty Python as I watched the joust, but I refrained.

Next year: Sheila goes in costume. There might be a blog entry or two about the making of the costume this coming summer . . .