Okay, listen, at this point I have given you more than enough time to miss me here–for over nine months I have just been quietly cooking unpublicized food and raising unpublicized children. Very generous stretch. For all you know I could have produced an entirely new human being in that amount of time! I didn't do that, at all, but I did get a new couch in December, so, you know. I've been pretty busy what with breaking that in and everything.
Anyway...where was I? When I left off we were 6, 8, 38, and 38, and now we are 7, 9, 38, and 39, because I alone have escaped the ravages of time and mortality not had a birthday since June.
Speaking of my eternal and uncorrupted youth, I've been growing out my natural hair color since late September and I think my Targaryen ancestry is finally asserting itself.
I feel like the salt-and-pepper club can be a little bit lonely for women, but fortunately I have plenty of strong, gloriously striped role models in my life.
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| Villain hair, don't care |
But I didn't return just to brag about my increasing decrepitude (ask me about my lower back!), I returned because spring is in the air and I'm ready for another cooking project in my life. I have spent most of my time away--and the game keeps track of hours, so I know for a fact that "most" is only a slight exaggeration--playing a game called Stardew Valley, which is about farming. And fishing. And mining. And sometimes there are monsters and treasures and caves full of fruit or mushrooms and secret woods and festivals and a wizard and you can romance the townspeople and
Uh, anyway, at a certain point you can upgrade your house and gather ingredients and cook some recipes in the game. So I'm going to cook those recipes in the real world, seeing as how I already have a house that includes a kitchen and everything. At first I thought "I'll just do the appealing things and think of fun alternatives for the unappealing things" but my friend and co-farmer Alex said that no, I must do all the things, and very thoroughly, and it soon went from me vaguely fantasizing about cranberry-hazelnut stuffing and rhubarb pie to a list of tasks I'm very much dreading and kind of a rock in my stomach when I think about it. So...a regular blog project. Of course, Alex also said I couldn't change the name of this blog to Erica's Blog but I sure did that anyway because Alex is not the boss of me, she's just very tall which can make it seem that way sometimes. So we'll see.
My advice to you now is to go buy this game on your phone or computer or gaming system, it costs $15 and will potentially give you literal hundreds of hours of joy and something to talk enthusiastically with me about, and then we can explore the food of Stardew together. Or else you can just...watch me flail about with seafood again, for old times' sake.
