Oh hey, I meant to write this all up last week. Well. It's more interesting this week.

What are you reading now?

The Count of Monte Cristo, translated by Robin Buss. Someone, presumably on Mastodon, recommended this translation specifically a few years ago, and I made a note of that but not of why. An internet search reveals that it's the only translation of the complete book; all others are working from an abridgement bowdlerization from 1846.

It's great, of course. The Three Musketeers is Dumas's most famous novel, but I would bet money that there have been more adaptations and retellings of Monte Cristo. It's a universal story. Heck, The Crow is a Monte Cristo retelling.

I read it once in the late nineties and enjoyed it. Sometime in childhood I read the chapter detailing Edmond's escape from the Chateau d'If, where he disguises himself as the dead abbé to get the jailers to carry him outside. I froze in delicious terror at the absolutely chilling line "The sea is the graveyard of the Chateau d'If." Unclear why I didn't seek out the rest of the book at the time, when that one chapter was so great.

What did you just finish reading?

Emily Tesh's latest, The Incandescent, about a teacher at a contemporary Magic School. It's spectacular. It's not quite as vehement as Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy but it still gets in some solid criticism of The System, and I think the worldbuilding hangs together a bit better than Scholomance's. It shares with Scholomance a feeling that the latter third is suddenly very different, but in Incandescent that's more obvious and with a very very good reason. Highly recommended. I suspect I shall reread soonish so I can figure out whether I think it all hangs together metaphorically as well as ... whatever the opposite of metaphorically is, in-the-world-of-the-book.

(I have a theory, which is by no means an original theory, that if a writer does not consciously direct her themes and metaphors they will tend to reinforce the prevailing social order of the time she is writing in, which may or not be a desired result.)

Before that, Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms trilogy. These are ... fine? The characters are great (I don't entirely believe Chaeri's heel-turn but that might just be me), the first book has a lot of moving everyone into position but once they're there the trilogy does not drag. I think this just caught me at a moment when I am spectacularly disinterested in powerful people complaining about how stressful it is to be powerful, and there is a lot of that. But: if you're looking for some colourful secondary-world fantasy, these are absolutely that, and excellent examples of it.

What do you think you'll read next?

I'm nine chapters into the 117 of Monte Cristo. "Next" seems like a very long ways away. Having said that, I'm carrying around a paperback of Morgan Locke (Laura Jo Mixon)'s 2011 shoulda-been-award-winning SF novel Up Against It in case my devices fail me, so hopefully not that but maybe.

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.