Malvena Pearl’s Emporium

There’s  lots of food at the day job due to the season. And lots of visiting children at the office. There are  people scurrying to get out of town or meet the air plane flights of relatives.

There’s room in my living room for me to unpack the rest of my books, wrap a few presents and complete a few projects for the web site, tagging photos and adding items to the shop.  There are friends to visit in the coming weeks who I haven’t seen for many months.  There’s some follow-up training for another day-job and a discussion to have about another potential part-time job. About that last item. I am starting to feel that I don’t have time to do one more thing, in addition to everything else. That’s becoming clear. As a wise friend once told me, “When you have all the burners going, sometimes stuff falls off the back of the stove.” Yep. My life is a kitchen appliance metaphor.

Mr. Acorn is suggesting that we go see The Accordion Babes play at a restaurant in Alameda on Christmas Eve, which is tomorrow night. I’m starting to think that’s a great idea, since the apple strudel at that place is wonderful. Also, I mean to attend the annual Browncoat Boxing Day party, held by my local group of science fiction fan friends. Those parties are pretty darn fun, I tell you what. The white elephant gift-exchange is a  fun time and the potluck food is great. And last year we had a menorah made of plastic cylons. And I believe there was some singing-along to the Dr. Horrible soundtrack. Or that might have been at another Browncoat party, this year. There will be dancing, most likely and good music.  They are great folks.

Happy Holidays to everyone. I hope yours are safe and happy.

I joined a friendly group of pals for Thanksgiving this year in Berkeley. We had a feast beginning with barbequed oysters and appetizers in the backyard garden and moved indoors as the sun went down and it got chilly. My costuming pal Lady Heather joined us and brought a lovely salad. Other delicacies included wild rice salad with green apples, sweet potatoes in a handmade sauce and the bbq turkey with mole’ sauce.  I made and brought Indian Pudding, a recipe from my grandmother. (it involves a lot of milk, molasses and a bit of cornmeal, baked in the oven for 3 hours - delicious with vanilla ice cream.) We also had a wonderful homemade chocolate torte with ginger snap crust, covered in raspberries.  Our group of diners included friends visiting from Colorado, Michigan and various parts of the SF East Bay. I hadn’t seen our hosts in quite a while, so it was good to get caught up with them and to enjoy their warm hospitality.

I met this morning with some friends from my D&D role playing group for brunch, which was a real treat; we usually get together about once or twice a month. We brainstormed about settings for upcoming campaigns, story ideas and characters we’d like to create. We are a gaming group of made up of some designers, an inventor,  a scientist, and some writers who are also crafty folk who love science fiction. We’ve been meeting for years as a group, taking turns being the creator/referee of the games. We had one campaign in which our Dungeons and Dragons game took place in outer space, using the same rules as a “regular” game, but with advanced technology and all sorts of new classes of characters. Our game creator made a web blog for our “space opera” characters to log in and make comments:  The Gathering Dark. It’s also where we’ve put artwork, related articles and photos that inspired us.  We’ve moved on to another game now and our “scribe” uses the Gathering Dark blog site to post notes of our current game. For the latest game, we have a new game master who is using the Fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. We play “old school” style with pens, paper, miniature figures, and dice. It’s really fun because it lets us be as creative and silly as we want and inspires all sorts of other projects. It’s interesting to see the changes in the rules with the new edition, since popular computer games have been developed to such a great extent since the original D&D came out in the late ’70s.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons is what originally inspired me to make costumes. I’d play with a group of students from my brother’s high school and our game masters were instructors there. We had several “live dungeons” and I started designing and making costumes for these games. So, it’s great to be with a group of people who really relate to the creative process and can participate on a regular basis.