rain, rain, rain...

In which we have decided not to dig shovel tests, so it is the lab and perhaps some bouldering on the way home for me. Yay acetone and sharpie and writing little tiny lables on things... or maybe just washing the stuff we dug up last week. And the computer (with speakers!) for stereo, since I have appalling amounts of music I haven't listened to yet (particularly since I've been going for things without words, or without words in english at least, as writing background)

Speaking of which... a moment of totally undeserved smugness here, that despite being vastly behind on my wc, I am now (according to saladmonkeylamb's tracker, at least) actually ahead of astormorray. Go me. I don't imagine it'll last. (And here I spent last November pretty constantly ahead of both of them. Oh well; it must have been some freak occurrance, not to be repeated...)

and the rain it raineth every day!

(so why nobody can figure out how to drive in it, I really fail to understand...)

So Brian left the terrible and despised (that's with the accent on the second syllable, I just don't know how to do an accent mark in here) ginseng tea in the kitchen here with a post-it note saying "Fabulous! Please try!"... and I succumbed to my curiosity and just made a cup. I agree that it tastes like dirt (nice clean dirt) although it smells like that as soon as you open the packedge, so I have no idea why he was surprised, but I really couldn't tell you where the soap came from. To me it tastes like dirt and bitter licorice root-- that sort of nasty kind of taste that's sufficiently interesting one keeps drinking it anyway...

Request for a voice of reason (who actually knows these things...)

So Brian was talking to his friend on the phone, and asked: "When we distill alcohol-- what's the difference between that and percolating?" (and later on: "This might be the best thing ever, or it might explode, I don't know.")

Does anybody know how a coffee percolator works? My pathetic websearch skills are not finding the answer to this. But it doesn't make sense to me that this would involve the same process at all-- I mean, to make coffee, you've got to drip water through coffee grounds, yes? So distilling would produce water that was less coffee-filled than filtration, right? And none of us (Brian, Carey or me) has any actual idea of how the percolator works, except that they have a glass bit on top where you can watch things steam. But if nothing else, if this were actually a viable option, surely one of us would have heard of it before, right?

Brian says he wishes to fight for the legal right to kill himself by distilling his own alcohol...

----

Ok, TR came in at about 3:15 or so and delivered an impassioned lecture on causing oneself blindness or death by distilling alcohol at uncontroled temperatures, explained the actual premise of distillation, and then gave Brian a phone number for a friend of his who actually makes various sorts of distilled alcohols (mead, and strong cider, and absynthe, which is actually what Brian has been trying to make for the past month or so and failing miserably.) Carey and I listened to them and laughed our heads off... I guess occasionally these people are worth keeping around for the entertainment value alone...

oh dear...

...and for some reason I don't think this had occurred to me before, but Prince Roland has just spent the last year (half his life, I think) sulking at the bottom of a pond, having been turned into a goldfish. Because Ceridwen didn't want to kill him off just because his father threatened/payed her to do it, but that's beside the point. The point is, how the heck good a king is he going to make, with this sort of background, anyway? And Rahmah's all into high society and politics, but she only just graduated from the Mouse Academy, and has an abreviated pseudo-internship with the french ambassador. And Dunya, who's suddenly in charge of half the kingdom, has kind of got experience being responsible for her siblings, but that's about it, and doesn't really want to rule anyway. Which is not to say that any one of them isn't very much better than the current King, but still...