Monkey monkey monkey & Happy New Year.
I have been cooking somewhat obsessively lately. I’ve been spending way more time cooking than I have, say, blogging (duh). Additionally, while in Virginia Beach visiting family last week, I finished the book I was reading (The Echo Maker
To make pork & sauerkraut because it’s New Year’s Day. This is, apparently, a tradition, although not one in which I have ever partaken before today. So, having no family recipe to use, I made the pork & sauerkraut recipe from Joy of Cooking
It turns out that none of the four eating creatures who live in this house really enjoy pork, and only one of the four eating creatures enjoys overcooked vegetables, which, ultimately, was what I thought this dish tasted like. Not really in a bad way — I think if one enjoyed pork and sauerkraut, one would enjoy this — just in a stewed vegetables sort of way. I’m taking the leftovers to my dad tomorrow; I think he’ll appreciate them more than we did.
Anyway, I suppose this marks the conclusion of the holiday season. I’m a little relieved. This was, as I mentioned in the last post, a good one — my New Year’s Eve may have even broken my streak of horribly disappointing New Year’s Eves — but now I have three weeks before classes start and no high-pressure events in the interim.
I plan to play some Civilization, do some laundry, and cook a little food. It’ll be a good year.
I have been doing research on new years traditions..for something i may write i am not sure it this something is poem but doubt it..i have found someinteresting images among the traditions including that in many parts of europe at midnight on new’s Years Eve they eat a dozen raisins or in some places grapes and make a wish for each one…they count down by eating and wishing.
Though not directly related yr pork and saur kraut experiment brought this to mind which you might know is german and alledgely brings good luck.
Happy New Year
Cooking is better than blogging. You can’t eat blog posts. People who play Civilization (I know a few–they tend to have organized and logical minds, but that’s a generalization) and like-minded games interest me, because I have never been able to understand it.
I played Sim City for a while as a kid, but only with the $FUNDS$ cheat on so I could build a huge city. I liked the structural and design aspects of it, but when it came to managing resources I decided to throw in some Godzillas to spice things up a little. I guess I am not cut out for raising civilizations. Oh yeah, and in Sim Life I would create a healthy habitat of sorts and then create the Ultimate Viral Killing Machine which would destroy everything and take over. I was an apocalyptic child. I think I’ve calmed down a little, though.
I remember playing SimCity when I was younger.
No matter how many ways I tried it, the cities I built flourished for a long time but eventually became overpopulated and overpolluted and ultimately failed. At this point, I began to wonder whether the game had no solution and was simply meant to teach players, through repeated failures, about the futility of the development of cities specifically and societies in general — sort of like how, in the film WarGames repeated simulations of global thermonuclear war (and games of tic-tac-toe) taught the computer (and maybe the humans) about the futility of the practice.
I stopped playing the game at that point. It seemed like the only winning move.