A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

In France for the second of two weeks with Steph's family. Five adults who do not believe in downtime and have packed ten pounds of touristing into a five-pound sack trip, two preteens who are good kids but still kids, and Steph's ten-year-old who will eat about six things, has absolutely zero concept of time, and gets intensely anxious. And me.

It has been a good if intense trip, and I have certainly had more France Experiences than I would have on my own. I am also stealing a few minutes this morning to journal before we rush off to The Next Thing and feeling guilty about it because folks are eating breakfast and I am being asocial.

Three(?) days in Paris doing the Catacombs, the Louvre, the Champs-Elysee, Sainte-Chappelle (Notre-Dame tickets were unobtainable) and Shakespeare & Co, then Versailles and down to Nantes, then Lascaux and Cap Blanc, through the Gorges du Tarn, and yesterday was Aigues-Mortes and the Camargue. At least half of these are nouns I would have no other referent for so I am hopeful I will have time to write them up more later before they fall entirely out of my head.

When I hit up the dollar store for wax paper for my Ogre gluing, so I wouldn't drip glue on everything, I also picked up a long roll of aluminum foil. For reasons that are unclear to me the grocery store will only sell foil in rolls that are slightly shorter than the short side of a (half-pan) baking sheet.

Normally when I make bacon I do it in the oven, on a baking sheet covered in foil. Normally I have to fold up the edges of the foil manually. Normally some bacon grease leaks out anyway and I have to carefully clean the baking sheet.

This morning I used the long roll of foil, and it covered the entire sheet with overlap on all sides. Near as I can tell no grease leaked through.

It's kind of astounding how having the right tools can improve one's life.

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Ogres remaining: one that requires surgery, five more that require colour choice and thought, and three that require both. I'm honestly a little startled that it's almost done. This has been an enjoyable project: it's not so fiddly that I get frustrated at my inability to do fine motor work, and it's producing tangible objects.

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This afternoon I decanted the vanilla extract I put up last summer. I'm less optimistic about this. The cinnamon extract I did in the fall was cinnamony enough but also pretty harsh, due I assume to using cheap vodka. Half the vanilla is likewise cheap vodka (though a different kind), so maybe that will turn out alright; the other half is spiced rum, and I have no idea how well that will do. At least it's only a dozen small bottles, instead of the twenty-odd of cinnamon that I need to do something with.

French toast tomorrow morning should give me some indication of quality, at least.

I also spent an hour or so scraping/squeezing "caviar" out of the beans to make vanilla sugar. This was an extremely annoying process that I do not recommend to anyone: removing sticky goop from slick wet beans is not a good time. But I am now prepared to make an awful lot of vanilla sugar. Just need to figure out where I'm storing it. Probably in one of my tall plastic bins: making one smell faintly of vanilla is unlikely to be a downside.

Next steps there are to let the scraped caviar sit until tomorrow so it dries out (possibly with an assist from the oven on low heat), blending it all into a small amount of sugar, and then mixing that into the full amount. The recipe I have calls for "one cup of sugar per vanilla bean". Online varies between one and two cups per bean, so that's a good starting point. Thing is, I undercounted woefully last time; I used eighty vanilla beans in the extract. These are small beans, so, sure, cut that in half. I used forty full beans to make the extract, that's twenty cups of sugar, at 200g a cup that's four kilos of vanilla sugar. That ... should tide me over for awhile. Get some pint or half-pint jars, that's much of xmas sorted.

Then I have the mostly-empty bean pods that I should do something with. I'm currently letting them air dry as well. I guess I could snip them up small and mix them into some (more) sugar.

Onward.