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Category: Creative Work

Roasted

Close Meat-ing, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

This is not my roast, Jen made this fine repast. I don’t make my roast the same way she does, she’s a bit heavy on onions and lets the meat dry out a bit sometimes.

When I make a roast it’s a simple affair:

Defrost roast
Place roast in roasting vessel with a mixture of several cups of water, a few tablespoons of garlic powder, generous helpings of white and black pepper and a helping of generic steak spice.

Ensure that you drench the meat in said mixture and that said mixture is mixed into water. Turn meat “Fattiest side up” and generously coat with black and white pepper on fat.

If you are feeling adventurous, add instant coffee to the water, enough for two cups of coffee to your taste.

Start to heat the meat (covered) at 300 degrees in the center of your oven.

After about 2 hours remove from heat, increase oven temperature to 350 degrees. Replace any lost water and add 1/2 cup of vinegar.

Return vessel to oven and let cook, check meat after about 1 hour and ensure that it has not dried, add water as needed.

At the 3 and a half hour mark (since you started) add potatoes and vegetables. Cover with water and let cook. [Again, if you are into trying new things, add hot peppers and spiced vinegar]

Allow the water to boil down (until the vegetables are mostly uncovered) in vessel, meat should pull apart easily with fork.

When the meat is ready and potatoes are soft enough, pull from oven and serve.

The meat should be tender and moist, you may turn the leavings in the vessel into soup or gravy.

Investigate 911!!! Yah Boo!

Investigte 911!!! Yah Boo!, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

Of all the pointless crap, this is Canada you shower of assholes. No one in Canada needs to investigate anything in New York. Okay? The guys in the USA aren’t going to start doing what you want when you deface buildings in downtown London, Ontario, Canada!

(Yes I know that I’m giving publicity to it, but bear with me)

Fries and a Reuben – Going Negative

Fries and a Reuben, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

When a political campaign takes to crapping all over the opposing camp, it’s termed “Going Negative” and when it is egregious and possibly slanderous, it’s “Ratfucking”

I’m not about to ratfuck the “Family Restaurant” on Wellington in London, but that is only because I might be forced to eat there again as part of the rodent coitus.

Let me start with the price, 8 bucks for frozen fries and a sandwich. Are you kidding me!?!?

The sandwich might cost about 3 bucks in materials if the meat and cheese are fancy. However, the cheese was “cheese food” – style swiss and the bread was barely rye. The meat was untenable and together with the lack of thousand island dressing made the whole sandwich part of the meal lackluster at best. I also burned my mouth due to the MOLTEN LAVA heat of the meat.

By the time I got to the frozen food product fries I wasn’t really able to enjoy them, due to my injured mouth and ended up just giving up on eating them. Which, if you know me is almost impossible for me to do.

For 8 bucks I expect to enjoy my food.

For 5 I can get a nice salad and the best Chicken Salad sandwich on earth at the King’s Cafe downtown london (near Galleria, next to the Brass Door). I recommend you avoid the “Family Restaurant” on Wellington, south of Grey Street North of Grand Avenue.

And that is Going Negative.

Free To You: A Movie Plot

I wrote this out in various forms over the years, but I can’t seem to get it down in a way that will make me money.  Maybe this will make you money.

Short Synopsis:  A middle-aged social worker is left holding the bag when one of her care in the community clients goes missing on the subway after a meeting.  The client is haunted by dreams of being a fighter during the crusades saved by monks of an unholy order, worshippers of a devil older than Christianity and darker than the black halls of their cloisters.   The social worker enlists the help of a down on his luck police sergeant and his teenage runaway son in a search through the halls of the city’s underground and the dark reaches of the tortured mind of a man lost in time. Now the homeless are going missing and body parts are being found in dumpsters all over the city.

Long Version:

Our hero is a Social Worker, she’s middle aged, single and committed to her job.  She’s smart, capable and single-minded.  She is literally married to her job and has little time for social contacts.  She splits her time between her care in the community office job and volunteering for local NGOs and social programs.  What spare time she has is spent researching the histories of her clients, she has a voyeuristic bent that drives her to delve deeper and deeper into the pasts of the lost people who wander into her life.  She keeps a telescope hooked to a webcam that she can control from her website so she can observer the streets outside her apartment at any time and from anywwhere.

The mystery man is a vagrant who drifts from care facilities to the street and back again.  Violent and disruptive, he often finds himself in trouble with the law, which suits him fine as they keep him heavily medicated and trapped behind bars; where he feels safe.  He is plagued by dreams of being a crusader, cutting down men in the middle east, only to be felled by an arrow to the chest.  He dreams of being taken to a monastary that hides a deep and deadly sect of Faustian monks, who have dealt with devils and demons older than Christianity.  He also dreams of stalking the streets of the city, unleashing these same demons on the poor and unfortunates in the alleys and subways of the city.  After his last visit with the hero he has decided to seek refuge in the deep tunnels of the city, only to find that the Monks that he dreamed of are real and operating under the guise of a Charity for the homeless in the city.

The Sargeant and his son are at constant odds, typical father-son conflicts; but the son has run away and the sargeant reaches out the hero for help in locating his son in the system.  The Sargeant is burnt out, sad that he has lost his son to the streets.  The Son left home to try and stretch his wings and gain some freedom from his “cop” father, he meets our mystery man in the streets and befriends him.  The son witnesses some of the horrors that creep from the mystery man during the night and looks for his father and our hero.

The “big bad” is a demon of the C’thulu level mythos, an old Demon who has been working with “The Order of the Whole” since before the Crusades.  The Monks are led by a charismatic old monk who is a figure in the city of ill-repute.  There is a vague air of menace around the order, but they are a generous charity who house and feed anyone who comes to their door.  They are feeding the homeless the remains of their compatriots, used in dark rituals to commune with their demon lords.

Plot arc: The Mystery man is introduced, walking into a police station and assaulting 5 police officers in acrobatic fashion, breaking at least two arms.  He is left in the care of the hero, to whom he relates some of his story (leaving out details about what he gets up to at night).  She concludes that while he is violent, he needs care and he is taken in an ambulance to a sanitarium for further observation.  Our hero looks into his past hsitry and sees hundreds of arrests.  The mystery man is “lost” en route by the ambulance drivers, who stopped for a bite to eat. This sets in motion the events that lead to the sargeant and the hero meeting.  After finding the monks, the mystery man is led by the demons to commit more and more horrors.  It is revealed that he is in fact the Crusader that he dreamed about, and he has been alive these many years, cursed by the demons after he slaughtered the whole order save one initiate (the leader of the order now).  It is the hero who in the end must face and defeat the whole order and the demons themselves.

Desktop Publishing is Hard

I’ve never found it difficult to put pen to paper when I have something to say.  Inspiration moves me easily and I can just fire out the words until my ideas are spent.  This comes in handy when I’m writing for fun or creating a knowledge-management entry or just documenting my work.

Converting the raw work into something I can sell, that has proven to be troublesome.  It’s not the words that are failing me, it’s arranging them with pictures for a vanity work that is killing me.  I sit down to it, fire up the software then get about 5 pages in and decide that I’m not getting anywhere, half because the picture system is so cumbersome and half because I lose the inspiration that got me there in the first place.

I’m using booksmart, has anyone had any experience with it? Is there a better system?

Have you ever made a vanity book?

Started work on my First "Book"

I’m finally going to put some of my less emo poetry together with my more stirring photography to make a photo book I can give as a gift and keep for posterity.

I snagged all of my old blog posts and now I’m going to have to get my poetry together too.

The working title is “Sometimes with Family”

It only "looks" like murder

it only “looks” like murder, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

Over the Victoria Day weekend (May Two Four weekend for the kids) we attended a picnic in the Back Yard of family friends. Many burgers were masticated and some marshmallows were immolated.

Their back yard was so massive, it had a forest in it!

We sat around a fire and shivered, I was wearing a short-sleeved over-shirt and everyone had to ask me if I wanted a coat or blanket or something (as they were freezing). No way! I have at least 6 inches of blubber keeping me warm at all times.

We played boccie and ate and then moved on; thanks Laura and Shawn!

Weekends are Wasted sometimes

I want to get out with my friend and finally get down to shooting some good concept photos, but laziness and schedules always confound my plans.  This weekend it was fear of rain.

I had planned a shoot down on the beach with the water and trees as a backdrop or a trip out to the country and the windmills as a backdrop, but with the weather so uncertain the best I got was a short trip down to the boardwalk and some shots in the sun with my nephew as a Samurai.

This weekend, weather and/or plans permitting I’m going to try and get things together for a shoot.  Nothing fancy or concept driven; just some posed stuff in the sunlight (maybe over some playground equipment).

It’s only monday; why am I making weekend plans already?