Huzzah, New England!

A couple of weekends ago I made a trip up to New England to visit some friends.  In fact, I have two friends in New England whose names are Tim.  Henceforth, they shall be known as Boston Tim and NH Tim to differentiate between them.  I headed up on Thursday to Boston to see Boston Tim and his wife and daughter.  I got there early enough so that I had a few hours to kill before they got home from work.  Cambridge is awesomely walkable, so I parked at their place and headed to Harvard Square.  Of course I went to the Harvard Book Store.  I can't resist bookstores, and this one is pretty great.  It's huge, and the basement is all used books.  I didn't get to go to BerryLine last time I was up there, so I walked around the corner from the bookstore and got a smoothie.  YUM.

I spent some time wandering around a bit.  I popped into two different comic book stores looking for The Thrilling Adventure Hour graphic novel.  Success!  I was excited to find it.  The Thrilling Adventure Hour is, I will quote from their website, "A staged production in the style of old-time radio."  I listen to the podcast.  Many thanks to NH Tim for recommending it.  I can't mention The Thrilling Adventure Hour without pointing out my favorite bit, "Beyond Belief."  This part focuses on a pair of married mediums, played by Paul F. Tompkins and Paget Brewster, who drink too much and are always having a good time.  I'm determined for some future Halloween to find someone to be a Frank Doyle to my Sadie.  Anyway, I bought The Thrilling Adventure Hour's first graphic novel and set out to find a place to read it.  This is when I came across Peet's Coffee.  I had only ever seen Peet's in the supermarket.  I was surprised to stumble upon an actual Peet's Cafe in Cambridge.  I got myself some coffee and sat outside.  I started reading the book and realized that I must have looked like an insane person, sitting there laughing out loud.  It was time to head to Boston Tim's place, anyway, so I put the book away and walked back.  For those familiar with Frank and Sadie Doyle:  CLINK!  

When I got to Boston Tim's, his daughter gave me a big hug.  I didn't think she would remember me.  It has been a few months since I've been there, and she is fairly young, but maybe she did.  Boston Tim had a contraption called Yonanas on his kitchen counter.  When I asked him about it, he wouldn't tell me what it did.  Instead, he got out some frozen fruit and made us mushed frozen fruit.  Okay, it tasted like sorbet.  I liked it.

Boston Tim and I both like to bake, although he is a much better baker than I am.  Hanging out with him usually leads to us discussing recipes and techniques.  This time was no exception.  He tried to give me some advice on my blueberry pie disaster.  He also made hot chocolate for me.  He did this because he knew I was going to Burdick's with NH Tim, and he insisted that he could make hot chocolate that was better than theirs.  Boston Tim's hot chocolate was excellent, but was it the best?  Keep reading.  Most of my friends don't like sports, so I had to get in lots of sports talk with Boston Tim while I was there.  Who doesn't want to talk about soccer?!  I don't know.  We played a soccer video game, too- FIFA '10.  Needless to say, Boston Tim kicked my ass.  He always does.  It reminded me of when we would play NHL '99 in college.  Tim was the master of NHL '99.  In FIFA '10, I played as Liverpool; Tim played as Arsenal.  Liverpool didn't humiliate themselves too badly at Anfield.  I lost by fewer goals each successive game.  I'm pleased that in the final game, I only lost 2-0!  Believe me, that's good against Tim.

Visiting Boston Tim also means that Boston Tim and his wife stuff me full of food.  We had some good stuff- lahmajun (Armenian pizza), mouhamara, Indian food, and the previously mentioned hot chocolate and Yonanas.  We also had some chocolate chip cookies that I had brought with me.  I'd like to point out that Tim didn't drink any of the hot chocolate himself.  He said it was crazy to drink hot chocolate in the summer.  I think it's crazy not to drink hot chocolate any time.

I got to spend some quality time with Tim's daughter, too.  There were lots of hugs.  I had stickers put on me.  I read to her, and we played catch.  She is a great kid.

I've known Boston Tim for almost twenty years.  It was great to be able to see him in person.  It was nice to be able to talk to an old friend.  Sometimes you need to talk in person instead of through texts and emails.

On Saturday morning, I left Boston and drove to New Hampshire to see NH Tim.  NH Tim packed lots of goodness into my visit.  We went to the fabled Burdick Chocolate for the previously mentioned hot chocolate.  They have several choices of hot chocolate.  I got a mix of milk and dark.  So, how was it?  It was amazing.  It was the best hot chocolate of all time.  That's right.  It was better than Boston Tim's.  I could drink this hot chocolate every day.  I want to try all of their hot chocolates!

NH Tim drove us around his section of New Hampshire.  It is incredibly beautiful there.  We went to an orchard on top of a huge hill, from which the view was spectacular.  We drove through a few local towns.  We stopped at a cool flea market.  Oh, and I saw the house where Ken Burns puts together his documentaries.  I thought that was neat, although I think NH Tim thought I was just humoring him when I said that.

Tim had some family stuff to do, so I snuggled with his kitties and watched a Too Cute! marathon at his place while he was out.  (NH Tim has an awesome dog and several awesome cats.)  That night, we played Cards Against Humanity with some of his friends.  After that, we watched some Rifftrax before calling it a night.

Sunday morning, I left the magical land of New England and drove home.  I had a great weekend.  Hooray to Boston Tim and his wife and NH Tim for having me stay with them.

Super fun weekend

Last month, I went to stay with my friends Josh and Jen for the weekend.  Our friend Tim was also there visiting.  It was a great weekend all around.

Highlights!

The Mutter Museum - Josh, Tim, and I went to Philadelphia to go to the Mutter Museum.  It's a museum of medical oddities.  We had talked about going together for some time, and this weekend, we finally got there.  Josh blogged about this himself, so I won't add much.  We saw the MEGACOLON.  It was cool.  I think I may have liked the dog and cat brains more, though.  Their brains were smaller than I would have thought, but their eyes were very large in comparison.

Capogiro - We got gelato at Capogiro.  It's only the best gelato ever.  I think my raving about it is the reason we ended up there.  Tim took a photo of his in which the gelato looked just as delicious as it tasted.  He posted it online somewhere, but I don't have the link for that.  Oops.

Cards Against Humanity - Cards Against Humanity is a card game that we played more than once over the weekend.  It's a lot of fun.  You play cards to make funny answers to questions or to fill in the blank sentences.  I can't explain it- follow the link to the website.

Adventure Time - I had never seen the cartoon Adventure Time before this weekend, but Tim changed that.  It's fantastic!  Josh may disagree with me on this.  I don't understand how anyone could not enjoy the adventures of Jake the dog and Finn the human.  Ahem.

MST3k - We are all fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  We had a mini-marathon of episodes late into the night.  Both Mike and Joel were represented.  I can always watch MST3k.

I had an awesome weekend.  My friends are the greatest.

Fort Mott

A couple of weeks ago I went to Fort Mott State Park with a cousin of mine.  I had never heard of it, but my cousin had been there before and suggested we go.  My cousin is awesome, by the way.  I don't just love her because she is family; I love hanging out with her, too.  This is the same cousin whose horse shows I've attended and with whom I went to New Bolton when her horse was having problems.  We go to the barn together fairly often, but this was the first non-horse related thing we've done together for a long time.

This is my cousin's horse. He's a cutie.

A cafe near Fort Mott allows members of a local photo club to hang photos there for sale.  My cousin belongs to the club, so we stopped at the cafe, The Graystone Cafe, on the way to the fort so that she could drop off a couple of framed prints.  We also picked up some food there and brought it to the park to eat before walking around.  I had a Caprese panini- tomato, mozzarella, basil, balsamic vinaigrette.  It's pretty much my ideal sandwich, and this one was delicious.

Time to walk around Fort Mott.  It's right on the Delaware River, south enough in New Jersey so that when looking across the river, it's Delaware and not Pennsylvania that's across the way.  We walked a path along the river and the sea wall.

An old watchtower presented itself as a subject for our cameras.

I liked the broken stairway and the keep off sign.

It was a little eerie.

It was kind of cool.

It was getting dark at this point, so the mosquitoes were in full-on attack mode.  Time to leave!  I had a lot of fun.  Fort Mott is a neat little place.

Blueberry pie disaster

I made my first pie this week.  Notice that the title of this post is blueberry pie disaster.  That about sums it up!

This sure doesn't look like a pie.

I made the crust from scratch.  I made the filling from scratch.  It came out looking like a mutant pie that no one should eat.  It didn't taste any better than it looked.  I used a recipe from Martha Stewart.  I'm not sure what was wrong.  I kept the crust ingredients cold.  I could see the little dots of butter in there when I rolled it out.  The filling smelled delicious when I mixed it all together.  It had to stay in the oven for a long time because it wasn't browning, and yet I had the oven at a high temperature at first and then turned it down to bake the rest of the way.  Usually I can figure out what went wrong with a recipe or what I didn't like about the finished product, but with this one, I'm stumped.  It went wrong and tasted bad, and I don't know why.

mutant pie

The blueberry filling ended up bursting out all over the pie, even though I vented the top.  This pie looked very pretty and had fluted edges when it went into the oven.  It came out looking terrible.  Hopefully, the next pie I bake will be better.  This is not my last pie.

Doctor Who: The Mind Robber

"The Mind Robber" is a story from the tenure of the wonderfully fantastic 2nd Doctor.  His companions in the story are Jamie and Zoe.

Zoe, Jamie, and the Doctor in the TARDIS

Jamie and Zoe are two of my all-time favorite Doctor Who companions.  Jamie is a Scottish Highlander from the past, while Zoe is a genius from the future.  Jamie is lovable and funny and somewhat excitable.  He went from fighting the Redcoats to travelling with the Doctor.  Zoe is brilliant, with an intellect that rivals the Doctor's at times.  She also kicks butt.  In this episode, she gets into a fight and uses Judo to beat a man twice her size.  She was downright Emma Peel-like.  

This story is sort of an oddball for Doctor Who.  It branches out into fantasy rather than the traditional sci-fi of the show.  It starts off immediately after the preceding serial, "The Dominators," ends.  The TARDIS is buried in lava, and they move the TARDIS outside of space and time to get out.  Does that make sense?  Not really.  But, they had to have a reason to get the TARDIS outside of space and time, so there it is.  The thing about this story is that it was originally supposed to be four parts instead of five.  The story before it was going to be five parts instead of four.  That was changed at the last minute, so the first part is kind of filler.  Also, they had no budget for it, so it took place entirely in the TARDIS control room and a strange, white, outside of time and space netherworld.  This was so they wouldn't have to spend money on sets.

The second part gets to the meat of the story.  The three travellers have arrived in a very strange place.  It's a land of fiction.  Jamie climbs what they think is a tree.  When he gets to the top, he looks down and sees that the trees are instead words in a book.  They run into Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels, the Minataur, a unicorn, Rapunzel, and Medusa, among others.  I really like what they did with Gulliver in the story.  He only speaks in lines from his book.  The Doctor says that because Gulliver is fictional, he can only speak the lines that were given to him.  It's very clever.  

Gulliver

The actor who played Gulliver, Bernard Horsfall, has an interesting history with Doctor Who.  This was his first appearance on the show, but he would be on three more times.  The next time was in another 2nd Doctor episode, "The War Games," in which he played a Time Lord.  This was the first time any Time Lords other than the Doctor were seen in the show.  His third role was in a 3rd Doctor episode, "Planet of the Daleks."  His final appearance was as another Time Lord in the 4th Doctor story "The Deadly Assassin."  Horsfall played four excellent parts in four strong episodes of Doctor Who.  (Okay, many Whovians think "Planet of the Daleks" isn't that great, but I like it.)  

Something very characteristic of the 2nd Doctor is demonstrated in the above screenshot.  He is always doing something with his hands.  It can be seen in the screenshot below, too.  The 2nd Doctor can be a bit fidgety.  He can also come across as not having a handle on the situation, but many of the Doctors are like that.  There is a scene in which Jamie is frozen still and his face becomes a blank slate.  The Doctor has to choose from different sets of eyes, noses, and mouths to get Jamie's face back.  He chooses wrong (he chose...poorly), so a different actor plays Jamie for a little while!

I haven't said much about the plot of this episode.  I don't want to say there isn't much of a plot, but there really isn't.  They need to get back to regular time, the Doctor wants to find out what's driving this land of fiction, and that's pretty much it.  The fun of this episode is the interaction with the fictional characters.  

I like "The Mind Robber."  It's unusual.  I'm an avid reader, so the idea of fictional characters coming to life is intriguing to me.  I'd like to meet some fictional characters myself.  

Soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies

I made chocolate chip cookies tonight.  The recipe came from a holiday cookie magazine Martha Stewart published in 2005.  They're called soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies, and they live up to their name.

They are quick.  They are easy.  They are yummy.  I used a cookie scoop to scoop the dough onto the cookie sheets.  It helps make them all the same size, and it's easier.  I also put the bowl of dough into the fridge between scooping.  This raw cookie dough is good.  I may have eaten too much of it.  Nope, I definitely ate too much of it.  Delicious.  I made these cookies for some friends of mine.  I hope they like them.