Arizona Heat

It hit 52°C in the car yesterday - yes, that thermometer runs a little hot, but still 52 is a ridiculous temperature for it to be. The thermometer in the house got to 47, which is what the weather people said it would be. It's 44 out there at the moment.

So we're inside playing Borderlands 2 for the weekend, because it's too hot to go outside. I'm really glad we went back to this game. Because once you get beyond level 10ish content, it actually gets really fun. For some reason I find the start of the game lacking, or maybe it was that when I played it before I couldn't help comparing it to borderlands (1) and it didn't have Mordecai and that made me sad. And what makes me really sad is that they changed Mordecai's voice actor between the two games.

Anyway. I really just wanted to post about the temperature, the borderlands stuff is filler :)

Homemade Chocolate

I made chocolate today. I was food shopping this morning and randomly bought cocoa. I'd run out ages ago and it's nice to have around for making random hot chocolate when the mood strikes me. So when I got home I put the tin on the counter and was inspired to make something with it right away. "What can you make I cocoa," I asked the tin. Google answered; coconut chocolate. Equal parts coconut oil and cocoa, and enough honey (or other sweetener) to take the extreme bitterness out of it (which in my case was 2/3 the amount of the other two). It's really yummy. And mostly good for you. If I could handle the bitterness on its own I'd totally leave out the honey, but alas, my poor tongue is too sensitive to bitter tastes.

So that's in an icecube tray in the fridge and I take a tiny bite of one square every now and then.

Neverwinter

This game is my latest obsession. Not for the game itself (which is a whole lot of fun), but for the player content. They have this feature called the Foundry where you can play quests made by players, and make your own. Some of the Foundry quests are as good as the best of the dev quests. They are a whole ton of fun to play.

The other element of Neverwinter I absolutely love is their screenshot software. It records the script of what your character does and then you can open it up in the editor and move the camera around and get extremely high quality screenshots. I messed around with that last night and this was us in Blackdagger Ruins.











In other random news, this is what the stats for my blog looked like today:

I love it when things work out

I was supposed to start an online writing course (writeaboutdragons.com) yesterday, but the organiser sent an email saying it was postponed until July. I'm so happy about this. Now I have the time to finish the dress I started in September (and put off because the pattern was miles too big and I became disillusioned at having to undo and repeat all the work I'd done so far).

So now I have time to make the dress. I'm going to unstitch it today and iron the pieces, then cut out the pattern pieces in the smaller size. But before I go near the mock-up I'm going to try measuring things. I have this idea to cut strips of the pieces at the waist and bust level to see about sizing without having the hassle of sewing the entire thing up. It will at least give me an idea if the size is way off like it was before. But I'll see if that works out.

So...
today: rip, iron, cut pattern, test size by making strips from the pattern pieces
tomorrow: (possibly finish cutting pattern) cut material
thursday: sew
friday: finish sewing, fit
monday: cut actual material
tuesday: sew
wednesday: finishing touches

I'll update with my progress later in the week. I think this schedule doesn't give me enough time, but we'll see how it goes.