I doubt seeing your stories in print would ever get old, but I have to say that the idea of someone actually performing my story leaves me feeling all tingly inside.

As some of you know, I get my fiction almost exclusively through audio, and in fact Escape Pod was the first audio short fiction podcast I ever listened to. Since then, I have listened to many, many episodes of Escape Pod, and in fact I even blogged about them (including a few of my favorite episodes) way back in June of 2011. Although there are dozens of really excellent audio fiction magazines I could recommend, the Escape Artist’s podcasts (Escape Pod for science fiction, Podcastle for Fantasy, and Pseudopod for horror) really are the industry standard for story selection, production value, and just generally putting out a quality product. Needless to say, I am thrilled.

As usual, I will keep you posted when the story is available.

If nothing else, she certainly has the smoldering look down:

This year, Sara volunteered me to help out backstage. I was more than a little nervous about this especially since I normally have no involvement with ballet whatsoever, so I had no idea what I was doing. Not to mention the fact that I would undoubtedly be the only daddy involved, so any stupid mistakes would only be magnified. I felt like I was representing my entire gender. My volunteer duties covered both the actual performance and the dress rehearsal, for double the fun.

However, the whole thing was a breeze. The kids pretty much take care of themselves at this point, so we really only needed to help them with their costumes and herd them in the right direction. Sara gave me tissues and lipstick to take in my pocket (I’m told all the best backstage mommies have lipstick in their pocket), and I managed to be Johnny-on-the-spot with both items, impressing several actual backstage mommies (thanks for making me look good Sara!)

For the actual performance, I couldn’t have had a better seat. I was just offstage, maybe 10 feet from the action. It was so much fun to see Evie performing. She just absolutely nails everything, with her usual meticulous attention to detail. You can see in the video that she is exactly on beat with the teacher on every step. One of my favorite parts of the video is right at the start of the free dance, about 2 minutes in, when Evie launches into it before anybody else even moves. I know she’s been thinking about this for a long time and practicing, so it was nice to see all of her hard work pay off.

Evie is such a little ballet teacher. When we were backstage, she was stressing over when we were going to go, warming up, and making sure everybody was lined up properly in the correct order. She was assigned to be the “caboose”, perhaps to make sure everybody in front of her was doing the right thing. Well anyway, that’s the way Evie took it, and she planned to do her job properly.

You’ll see what I mean at exactly 1:02 in the video. When Evie sits down, she catches the eye of the boy across from her, and then quickly demonstrates to him on how he should be holding his arms. This cracked me up so much, because it’s just Evie in a nutshell, knowing every single piece of the performance and “teaching” everyone how to do their part. You’ll also notice at the very end, when they all line up, she quickly corrects her feet to their proper position.

So anyway, without further ado, I give you the Dew Drops:

ETA: Since I wrote this post, Evie has informed me that she’s started a “dance school” for her classmates. She has choreographed a “tulip dance” (because “our arms look a tulip when we do the circle”) and she is teaching her pupils in preparation for a performance she’s arranging on the final day of school. She demonstrated a little bit of the dance for us, and I assure you it is as fully featured as the one performed above.

In exchange for:

• whole wheat honey bread (6 loaves)
• yogurt (5 14 oz jars)
• cantaloupe vanilla jam (3 4 oz and 1 8 oz jar)

We received:

• Cinnamon pecan butter
• Preserved lemons
• Overnight French boule
• Focaccia
• Orange sea salt caramels
• Hot pepper jam
• Strawberry rhubarb orange preserves
• Potato, cheddar & chive frittata
• Rhubarb curd shortbread bars
• 2 copper river heirloom tomato plants
• 1 wapsipinicon peach tomato plant
• Garlic & oregano butter
• Plum with vanilla orchid tea jam
• Cardamom peanut butter
• Cashew butter with candied Pomegranate
• 4 chocolate peanut butter Whoopie pies

Naturally, the desserts are always the favorites at our house. In this case the Whoopie pies carried the day, with the rhubarb curd shortbread bars a close second. However, for my money, nothing beat the garlic & oregano butter / focaccia combination.

It was also a cool idea to get tomato plants. We’ve planted them in the garden, so hopefully they take off (I believe they had been started from seedlings, so two of them at least were little tiny baby tomato plants). If they do, they are certainly “worth” a lot of food compared to a loaf of bread.

Speaking of bread, that was a lot of bread! I was baking bread for 2 days, since I did 6 loaves for the swap, another two loaves for us, a couple of batches of granola, and a batch of oatmeal cookies on top just for funsies. Seems like it was worth it though, since Sara traded all the bread, including even the one that she had sliced up for samples. Besides, usually Sara makes everything for the food swap, but i do a lot of the eating, so it was probably time to pull a little weight.

As always, very glad to have an opportunity to try a bunch of unique homemade items!

Ollie: “Here Grandpa, you can use some of our sun scream.”

Ollie: “Hey, did you write on my picture?”
Sara: “Oh, sorry buddy, I was researching tomatoes. I really like your picture though. What was it, a spider?”
Ollie: “A zombie.”

It’s actually a pretty good zombie picture. But how does he know what a zombie looks like??

The Reason:

I’m still trying to burn through some of my stored-up food posts, and that means pancakes! So you’re getting another First Friday Food that is not on a First Friday.

As far as the reason to make crepes, one day it just occurred to me that I could make crepes. With whole wheat flour no less! We’re always looking for good pancake recipes, and crepes are a significantly different form of pancake.

The Journey:

First off, I’d like to specify that I originally learned how to make crepes from an actual frenchman. I don’t have his fancy pan or fancy crepe-scraping tool, but make no mistake, I know how to get the job done.

All that being said, flipping crepes is no joke, even if you don’t flip them in the air. There is certainly a skill to it. Be prepared to have ripped up and shredded crepes, even after making hundreds and hundreds of the things. Making crepes is somewhat stressful, and requires your full attention. But afterwards, you get to eat crepes, and the ripped up ones taste the same as the nice ones!

The recipe calls for the ingredients to be mixed in a blender. Do it! I tried everything I could to avoid it, including mixing with a mixer. It doesn’t work. If you get chunks in your batter, they will stick to the pan, and then you’re not going to get nice looking ones.

Also, use a LOT of butter on the pan, in between each and every crepe. You really can’t over-butter it. Just remind yourself you’re cooking like a French person, and throw an extra pat on there. You’ll thank yourself when you try to flip one.

The Verdict:

Making crepes is not that difficult, but it is a LOT of work. You have to make LOTS of them, because people will eat them way faster than you can make them. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

But, might I add, they make you look very fancy pants impressive.

Crepes are so versatile. You can basically put anything on a crepe. Even setting aside savory crepes, you have jellies, jams, curds, marmalades, peanut butter, nutella, and just plain sugar. You could have these every day of the week and not get tired of them.

Well, not get tired of *eating* them. But you will definitely get tired of making them.

The Recipe:

Recipe from 100 Days of Real Food.

We all need hobbies to take our minds off of the daily grind, and relax. However, there’s no reason these hobbies can’t also help to hone skills needed in the case of the inevitable.

At its heart, canning is about sterilization and food preservation, two things very near and dear to our hearts. The general idea is to heat the food and container to a temperature that will kill any bacteria, and then vacuum seal it to prevent contamination. Canned foods can last up to five years (or even longer in some circumstances), require no refrigeration or electricity, and are self contained in a package suitable for travel.

Low-acid foods, such as meat or vegetables, must be canned in a pressure canner. (Note: a pressure canner is not exactly the same as a pressure cooker!) High-acid foods, such as fruits or pickled vegetables, can be canned in a simple hot water bath. Recipes can be more or less complicated, but this can be as simple as filling a sterilized jar with fruit and sugar water and dropping it in hot water for 15 – 20 minutes.

The equipment for hot water bath canning is easy enough to come by. The hot water bath itself is easily improvised with a large pot and a fire. However, the more difficult part to obtain are mason jars, lids, and rings. Jars and rings are re-useable, but lids are not.

In my experience, small, local hardware stores are surprisingly one of the best places to get canning supplies. Since you will undoubtedly need to raid a hardware store at some point, be sure to stock up on lids. This should be especially easy, since the foolish or short-sighted will probably not be thinking of this long-term item. Jars can be obtained at the same place, but vast, undiscovered caches of jars are living in the basements of old ladies everywhere. Jars can be reused, so you can also start with a few and grow your collection over time. Just be sure that there are no chips or cracks around the edges of the jars, since these will prevent the jar from sealing.

There is a little bit of an art to canning, so it is smart to invest some time now, while you have the luxury. In the long term, you have a relatively sustainable way to preserve the vegetables from your rooftop garden (you are planning on having a rooftop garden, right?) to help sustain you for years to come. And the best part? This is a useful hobby to know in a non-post apocalyptic world: nothing beats homemade jam!

For reference books, I suggest the old standby, the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. However, if you’re looking for something a little more modern, I’d recommend Food in Jars or Canning for a New Generation. For an online reference on canning (as well as a literal map on where to head for food when the collapse comes), check out pickyourown.org.

Shane is a programmer and writer who blogs at shanehalbach.com about zombies, bacon, pirates, and his children (not necessarily in that order).

This is not the first time I have crawled my way out of this black hole. In defense of my sanity, as well as defense of all my other hobbies (including sleep), I’m going to throttle down a little bit. So if I don’t comment on your Facebook as much as I used to, or if I unfollow you on Twitter, Please don’t be offended. It’s not because you are uninteresting. Quite the opposite in fact.

Additionally, I will also be cutting down on my blogging.

On Jan. 3rd 2009, I started posting on my blog 5 days a week. It was a little bit of an experiment to see if I could. At that time I didn’t think it would last very long. It seemed impossible, and I also worried it would hurt the quality of the posts. A little over 4 years later, I am ready to call the experiment quits.

I’ve really enjoyed the challenge and I think that, not only did the quality remain high, but I think it actually improved. Blogging is still something I love, and it really became part of my personality during that time. I’ve received such nice feedback from people, and it’s really kept me in touch with a lot of people that I wouldn’t otherwise had any contact with. Lately, however, it has become too much of a burden. Sara could tell you how much time I spend fretting about things like, “I need another post for this week!” or “Is this really good enough for a post?” or “Why is my traffic going down? Was I boring this week?” or “Make the kids do something funny! I’m short on quotes!” This becomes doubly difficult when something’s going on, like stress at work, or queuing up posts for a multiple week vacation.

Since I receive no tangible benefits from blogging, there’s really no reason to add this kind of stress to my life. I will still continue to blog whenever I feel like it, which will no doubt be multiple times per week (maybe even every day!). However, I will no longer force myself to make an arbitrary post count.

Thanks to you who have enjoyed my blog over the years. I hope you will continue to enjoy it as it enters yet another new chapter.

-The Management

Evie: “Ollie’s following me around and being a copycat!”
Ollie: “No, I’m not a cat!”

Sara: “We should take your dad out to breakfast for Father’s day. It will be perfect, since we’ll all be there. And we can go really early, while the rest of the dads are in church.”
Me: “BWAHAHA! Oh my god, I would totally use that as a quote, but it would give away the whole thing.”
Sara: “Like your dad reads your blog.”
Me: “Like my dad reads.”

Ollie: “The story I’m telling myself is very long.”
Me: “Oh yeah? What’s it about?”
Ollie: “Cake.”

Sam from A Few Fine Things nominated me for the “One Lovely Blog” award!

I don’t believe I’ve ever received any sort of blogging recognition or award before. And though Sam is not exactly a *stranger* per say, since she comments on Glipho frequently, it’s nice to be recognized by someone I don’t exactly know! So thanks Sam, much appreciated (and also for cluing me into some new blogs to read!)

Rules of the award:

- Add the “One Lovely Blog Award” image to your post
- Share 7 things about you
- Pass the award to seven nominees
- Thank the person who nominated you
- Inform the nominees by posting on their blogs

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these “things about me” lists (since Feb. 2009 apparently), but nonetheless I can’t think of a SINGLE THING about me that I have not already plastered all over the Internet. Not one. Really struggling here.

Okay, here goes….

1. I am afraid of busses. Well, afraid of them is not really the right word, but they make me anxious to the point that I would never choose to use them if I could help it. Trains are okay. Trains are on a rail and they can only go where they can go. A bus can just close the door and drive to Abu Dabi.

2. I used to be blond. Like, really blond, all through my childhood, long after you would have assumed my hair wasn’t going to change color. For that matter, I USED to be cute:

3. Speaking of things I used to be, I used to be a mallrat, like you read about. I would spend hours there, bumming around stores, buying things, getting pizza at Sbarro (or free samples from Chik-fil-a), meeting up with people, etc. I could still probably draw you a pretty good map from memory, with all the key stores marked out. But it was so much more than that! There were like rival gangs. For example, for arcades I was a Tilt guy. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in the Golden Nugget. Likewise, I would only buy music in NRM. Sara finds all of this absolutely hilarious, and can’t fathom how this could be a part of my past.

4. I come from an *extremely* big extended family. My dad was one of 7 kids, and my mom was one of 17 kids. No multiple births (twins, etc.). Just lots and lots of babies.

5. I am ranked as one of the top 3 pillow jugglers in the world.

6. One time when I was driving my car caught on fire. There was the smell of burning wires and smoke started pouring out of the steering column. It turns out that with that particular model, it was not exactly unheard of. The weirdest part about the whole thing was that the car ended up being totally fine without any sort of repair required.

7. I am a terrible cook, but I like baking. It’s not crazy to go through 5 pounds of flour in a weekend, although not as much lately perhaps. A lot of that is bread for the week, and most of the rest is pancakes. Lots and lots and lots of pancakes. We usually go through 30+ pancakes on a Sunday.

On the matter of my own nominees, here are some of my favorite Gliphers at the moment:

1.  Tess Wynn - I’ve been kicking myself for missing her on my Meet A Glipher list of favorite Gliphers!! So glad I got a second chance. Love her sense of humor, plus we’re both originally from Wisconsin, so there you go.

2. Kami McArthur - Kami is a super sweet, just starting out writer (like me!), and I feel like her sincerity and ernestness really come through in her posts.

3. Woelf Dietrich - Another writer, but sort of the photo-negative of Kami. Dude’s got HP Lovecraft and a giant man-eating squid on his homepage right now. Not only is that awesome, but I want to see how he’s going to fit a ”Lovely Blog” award on there with the rest.

4. Laura Locket - Laura writes every day, and no one knows better than me what a challenge that is, not only to do it, but to keep it interesting!

5. Garden Geekery - Bees! I am currently fascinated by bee keeping, as we’d like to keep bees one day, and therefore this blog.

Alright, I hate to go outside of Glipho for this, but…

6. Alexis Abell - An old friend, with some hilarious kid adventures. If you’re a fan of Quote Monday, you should check out her blog.

7. Rodan - A VERY old friend! It’s kind of hard to explain his blog, but I lurves it. Each post is like a surreal dip into the inner workings of his strange brain, where everything starts out normal, but nothing is as it seems.

To my nominated (Glipho) bloggers – if you could click the version button at the bottom of this blog post when you wish to do your own nomination post then it will link all our blog posts together in harmonious loveliness.

It seems somehow appropriate when he climbs up on top of the coffee table to play a little solo up there, and when he jumps to the couch he doesn’t even miss a note. I can certainly see him performing the same moves from the top of a bar or while stage-diving at a concert.

Better start saving up for tickets now, because it’s going to be all arenas.