Forward the Evil Empire!

Okay, it's announcement time. Today, I signed an agreement to buy out a small restaurant downtown. For a rather reasonable sum, I acquire their business including a good assortment of kitchen equipment, furniture, supplies of great variety, and hopefully their clientele. I take possession of everything on June 1st, and the previous owner is willing to help me out through the week getting the hang of things. I've already lined up my niece Kayleen to be my unofficial partner/Dark Queen of the Fry Basket (being married now, she's no longer qualified for Dark Princess), and between the two of us I'm pretty sure we can have a lot of fun and turn an already-decent lunch cafe into something really interesting (and profitable). At any rate, this is my shot at a dream, and while I'm scared spitless at times I'm gonna give it my best. Anyhoo, as I get the chance I will be posting updates and pictures of my new place and its probably slow transformation from Union Jack's British & American Lunch to The Ogre's Den Breakfast, Lunch, Dessert, and COOKIE! Note to self - find a milk supplier.

In the meantime, I will still be doing the Farmer's Market on weekends. There's not enough downtown lunch business to justify being open on weekends, so I'll at least be able to somewhat relax two days a week... Anyhoo, gotta go look at an oven in an hour, an Evil Emperor's work is never done - at least not until he gets sufficient minions to delegate everything.

I Have Seen the Dark Side, And It Is ...Fuzzy

Okay, I've seen Episode 3. I can agree that it was, on the whole, better than 1 and 2, but I still really couldn't get into it. Of course, one of the reasons for that might be because something was malfunctioning at the theater, only the exact center of the screen was in focus. Everything else was a little blurry, enough to make details hard to be sure on. The story was better, but I still have trouble buying Anakin and Padme as a couple (It wasn't as dumb as in Ep2, but it was close). And as was the case with the previous two, I am left with the feeling that George was trying to cram too much into each shot. Yes, George, it's well-done and very pretty (especially the Twi'lek women), but I came to see a story unfold, not to obsessively watch every corner of the screen for details.

Anyway, the short version is that Ian MacDiarmid rocks, as does Ewan MacGregor. Yoda remains the essence of non-grammatical coolness. Hayden Christensen tried harder and on the whole did okay. Natalie Portman tried to make the best of it, but there was just no saving the way Padme was written in this one. Maybe there's a psychological explanation for her, but I was ...disappointed to see a tough and resourceful woman (in the first two movies) turn into a helpless weepy thing that dies from ...well, what she dies from. I don't know, maybe that's a believeable reaction to pregnancy hormones and secret husband stress, but I wouldn't have any experience to compare that with.

Anyhoo, trying to return to having a life now... Busy busy busy this week, mostly about stuff I'm not ready to talk about for fear of jinxing, but I've got a good-sized order of cookies going out in the morning and market this weekend. Money, yaaay! Also I've gotta sit down and do some serious planning for A Candle in Chaos, my online swashbuckling rpg. I've set the stage for some interesting stuff, but now it's time to start working up storylines involving cat-fur-wearing slavers in anarchical pseudo-France. And if I have time, Paulie on a pony...

Rock and Rolls

Huzzah, the wedding is over. Our guests they hath gone home, and soon life shall be back to what passes for normal around here. Saturday was a very long and almost entirely good day. The market got off to a wonderful start when I found the perfect wedding present for Kayleen in an art dealer's booth. Note to self: Deliver wedding present at next opportunity. The market went very well, I ended up selling every last cookie once again. If I keep baking more each week, I'll eventually start having leftovers, right? Okay, so I sold the last four bags to Mom for use as lunch refreshments, but a sale is a sale, right? I also found some nice polished pieces of Brazillian agate at another booth and bought a handful to use as paperweights. I don't know agate from Agamemnon, but they're pretty and they hold down things they're piled on, so all in all a good deal. I also managed to trade a cup of my special punch for some half-loaves of bread from the Volker's Bakery booth. They're based out of Utah, but I like their bread a lot better than the Great Harvest bakery here in town. GH is a little too hippie/yuppie for my taste, their bread isn't bad but they fancy it up with sunflower seeds and low-carb wheat and all kinds of things that make it feel like their place is as much a cause as a bakery. Volker's is probably every bit as healthy, but they focus on making good european-style bread rather than trying to make you feel good about their bread. Their focaccia is wonderful stuff, I used a half-round of it for dinner tonight. Spread it with garlic butter, top it with swiss cheese, melt it under the broiler, and Life Is Good...

I'm pretty proud of how the wedding reception went last night too. When I was ready to go out there I tossed my chef coats and a few scarves in a box, grabbed my nephew Jonathan, and headed out to the church building it was being held in. It took a while to get things settled so we knew what we were doing, but by the time the reception was ready to begin we had the kitchen worked out and two more helpers recruited. Jonathan, his sister Caitlin, and Kayleen's little brother Quenton are all in their early teens, old enough to think on their feet but young enough to still take direction. If there is one truth I have learned, it's that if you give a kid a chef coat and a job to do, he will happily work his tail off. I am not a great chef, and I don't have the ambition to become one. But I will say this, I am getting pretty good at organizing a catering kitchen, and between that and my helpers and the planning abilities of my sister and her daughter the bride, we rocked the reception. The food flowed out in a steady stream, there was rarely a real shortage of anything, and nobody walked away hungry. By the time the party started to wind down, I Was Beat. But dang I felt good.

For now, we're just slowly putting our house back together and eating up the leftovers. There's a bowl of lasagna in the fridge that I've got my eye on for breakfast, and there's still some little cheesecakes floating around begging to be filled with a bit of strhubarb jam and eaten slowly. There's something else I'm planning for tomorrow, that I am really going to be ringing the Goddess of Fate's bells about tonight. I don't want to talk about it too openly to avoid jinxing myself, but it involves a possible business opportunity, and if I pull it off it'll be the bravest thing I've done in years. Wish me luck!

The Evil Overlord does not condone the harming of animals unless it's A) fictional, and B) funny. This message brought to you by the Greater Council for Enlightened Chaos.

Quiet! I'm trying to listen to the little voices...

Looks like I'm gonna get a small sanity break. It's not that I don't love my sister, and young Gabriel is a cute kid, but the bottom line is that he's nearly two and and Annette and Merril are the parents of a nearly-two-year-old, with all the craziness that implies. (blasphemy) There have to be reasons people tough out the "old enough to talk, but not old enough to say anything besides no" stage, but I haven't twigged on to any of them yet. My siblings could probably tell me, but I don't think I want to know. Frankly, it's probably for the best that I'll likely be single the rest of my life, I don't think I want to have kids if it means having little kids... They're cute, and it's not like it's their fault, but still... (/blasphemy) At least with fifteen grandkids and one great-grand, I imagine my parents won't be pestering me to continue the family line any time soon, thank Urd...

At least it's been raining. Yesterday we got an inch and then some, it's been a very wet spring compared to what we're used to, and I for one am loving it. People who love sunshine are either very disturbed or have never lived in a drought-stricken area, more likely the former. The world's just a nicer place after (or during) a good solid washing, smells nicer too. If the weather reports can be believed, we're in for a few days of sun before the next bunch of storms might come in. As long as it doesn't rain on my market day, I don't mind.

The Market's going great so far, two market days so far and both times I've sold everything I've taken. To celebrate, I took myself out to dinner Saturday night, a new chinese place recently opened up a few blocks from my house. The food is great and the service is almost scarily obsequious, I just hope they don't go out of business like most every other restaurant I like... At the end of each meal, instead of a fortune cookie you get a half an orange, neatly presented, to clear your palate with. It's different, but I think I like it.

At any rate, rain or not Market this week is gonna be fun. We're having a steel drum band come and play for us...

Bunker Time

This is the problem with weblogging right here. I've got something I'm itching to write, and I don't dare write it because I know at least one family member will see it. Sorry, Thom, I know you'd most likely be the one who'd understand or at least listen, but I can't take the risk of setting off a family meltdown right in the middle of Annette's visit and Kayleen's wedding celebration... Man, I wish I could move out...

And the sign said "Blindfolded Spinny People Need Not Apply"

It's raining in the Evil Empire today. This is a good thing, we never get enough of it around here. I think California must hijack our clouds or something. Let's drop a bomb on them ...as soon as my sister moves out of the San Fran area, that is.

My parents went to visit my brothers over the weekend, something I always enjoy. It's nice having the house to myself, the quiet and the absence of psychic pressure is a very good thing. On the other hand, renting the third Matrix movie and watching it at midnight was not such a brilliant idea. Even after watching another movie and reading for a while, I still had nightmares. When will I learn? Ever since the first Matrix flick came out, I've heard endless blahblahs about how wonderful and meaningful that series is. Now that I've seen all three, I can say with perfect honesty: bullhonkey. The effects are good, but that's pretty much it. The plot has holes big enough to fly a hovership through, most of the characters are either blatant movietypes (the Hapless Rookie, the Grizzled Sergeant, the Cute Little Girl, etc) or just plain balsawood, and there really is a deep philosophical message in all this, I just don't see it. The big bad battle scenes where the underground colony of free humans does its best to hold off an army of flying squid drones just made me shake my head. It should have been over in ten seconds, with the humans losing. Think about it, right now we have the technology to build an automated sentry gun (I forget what they're called, but the Navy has had them for a couple years at least) that can not only pick off a target drone but shoot off the links of the towchain from the drone to the plane towing it one by one. Given that we can do that now, why on earth wouldn't these sentient machines be able to do that much or better centuries in the future? Yeah, I know, it's a sci fi movie and not reality, but still, a little explanation why the human army with their machine-gun servo frames (that didn't even provide any cover, no less) weren't dying at first sight would have been nice. For that matter, why didn't these attack drones have projectile weapons of their own? The machines must be running on Windows, I swear... Anyhoo!

Back to something remote interesting. Many thanks to my brothers, who sent birthday presents back with my parents. If you gotta take your parents back, it's always nice to be bribed to do it. Dan sent me a little hand-painted sign that says "Time, tide, and the last chocolate chip cookie wait for no man!", methinks that one is going with me to the market next week. From Thom I got "The Essential Andreas Vollenweider", which came complete with a music video for one of the songs. It's good music, but I think Andreas's idea of which of his songs are essential and my idea of such are a bit different. I like Andreas Vollenweider for the 'soundtrackness' of his albums, I can pop one in while I'm baking or doing something else and enjoy the musical flow of things. A 'best of' album doesn't have the same flow, but I don't think it's hurt my enjoyment too much. Thanks, broski!

The thing that really makes me chuckle, though, is the music video for "Pearls and Tears". Music videos are kinda pointless organisms to begin with, but cross that with the overall "images rather than words" concept of new age music and you have the Seinfeld of video. For this song, you start out with this pretty shot of panning over some desert dunes while the 'ooohweeoooh people' do their thing. Then you focus in on one spot where these people dressed up like nomads climb up out of the sand and start drawing in it. Then they hide back under the sand again as these blind-folded people do this spinning dance all over the nice pictures the nomads just drew, wiping them out. when they go, the nomads come back out and start drawing again, and again they don't get very far before the spinny people come back... I'm not entirely sure who wins in the end, or if anyone was supposed to, but can you imagine what the people who do these videos tell their friend? "So, you do anything cool today?" "Not really, I just strapped on a blindfold and danced barefoot all over Ralph's sand paintings. At least it pays well..." Guess I must not be an artsy person, cause I just don't get the deep significance behind these kinds of things. ::shrug::

On the other hand, there's just something highly entertaining about this site. I have this strong urge to start a rock band and name it "Lost in Tram Station"...

Return of the (Farmer's) Market Economy

Well, here I am attempting to write a blog post. In all honesty, the concept still feels weird, but that's because I've spent most of my life trying to keep people from knowing what goes on in my head. The one thing I learned in grade school was that nobody really wanted to hear what I had to say, and the lessons you learn at that age are hard to unlearn. Anyhoo, on the off-chance that someone really does give a huhu...

This is gonna be an interesting month for the Evil Empire. This Saturday marks the opening of the Farmer's Market for this summer. I've looked forward to it since the day the market closed last year, in part because of the fact that I made a fair amount of money selling my cookies but mostly because the market is one place where I can make my own success. I set up my booth, put my cookies on display, and proceed to have my kind of fun for the next four hours. It's work, of course, but it's also the most fun I've ever had while working. I'm sure my brother Dan can attest to the feeling that comes when people see something you made and appreciate it. He makes pens and does other woodworking on the side, I've never been able to figure out what his day job is, I think it's some random management thing. He and I have never been friends, but I can respect him for finding a way to keep his creative side and make a little money off of it.

That's one of the things that makes this 'weblogging' concept so weird. It's like writing a journal (something people of my upbringing were encouraged to do - which is why I rarely did it), but you know that the people you are writing about will probably see it at one point or another. They always said we should leave records for 'posterity', but with this format your posterity is looking over your shoulder as you write. Why should we give a hoot about our posterity anyway? I don't know my ancestors, and I don't give a hoot about them, so why would I expect my descendents to be any different. I don't owe them, and they don't owe me. Anyhoo, moving on...

As I was saying, the Farmer's Market starts this Saturday. It's gonna be a slow first week, because they're currently tearing up the street in front of our location, but I'm gonna go anyway. I've bought a lot of new things for my booth this year (new canopy, new table, signboard, etc), and I want to shake things down so I can have my act together and my groove working. And it's not like leftover cookies really go to waste in my family...

The week after that, one of my favorite nieces is getting married. Both of my favorite nieces are getting married this summer, but the other one's waiting til later in the season. I don't have a very large active role in the festivities, but I'll still have plenty to do. The foremost of my duties is helping Mom hang on to what sanity she has left without giving her the idea that I am hers to command. It's rarely an easy task, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. At least the bride is relatively sane. She is planning what sounds like a swanky occasion, but she's doing most of the catering work herself and she's not prone to primadonnic fits either. My job will be to run the kitchen during the reception, which essentially means getting the food and drink organized and served in a timely fashion. I like to think I'm good at it, and if anyone disagrees then they're too afraid of getting bit by the rabid chef (a valid concern) to complain too loudly. Yeah, I'm tempermental (emphasis on mental), but I really hate sitting around social functions trying to pretend I like people. At least this way I have something to do that needs doing, I have a place I can retreat to, and I'm freeing up someone else to go enjoy the party. There's also the fact that chef coats look classy and you can wear whatever you please underneath.

Between getting ready for market and Kayleen's wedding, it's gonna be an interesting month. At least I've got my online games, my friends, and my writing to provide a little balance. I started writing a new story a couple weeks back, and so far the reader response has been overwhelmingly positive. Hopefully I can keep from getting uptight over it and keep writing for fun...

Anyhoo, thus are the thoughts of the Evil Overlord today. Aren't you thrilled? Save your yawns til you're outside, or I'll have my guards throw you in the dungeon...