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Look at how awesome I am! I made little makizushi out of cheese! That's sharp cheddar on the inside and havarti on the outside. I even made cheese pickled ginger! Lookitthat!

How do you get it to come out like that, though, you ask? Here's my recipe for Cheese Sushi:

Cheese Sushi:

Ingredients:

• Sharp Cheddar (cut into strips about one centimeter square by 4 inches long)
• Havarti (thinly sliced)

You'll need:

• Plastic (cling) wrap
• A very sharp knife
• Chop sticks

1. Take the square strips of cheddar and wrap them very tightly in one or two slices of havarti (depending on the thickness of the havarti and the desired diameter of the finished sushi), making a cheese log.
2. Wrap log entirely in plastic (cling) wrap.
3. With warm hands, squeeze the wrapped cheese log until the surface smoothes and there are no visible cracks or holes in the surface.
4. Unwrap and slice into approximately 1cm slices. If the havarti starts to crack or unwrap, use warm fingers to smoothe it back into place.
5. Serve on a cute sushi tray with chopsticks and cheese pickled ginger!
   
   To make cheese pickled ginger:

1. When wrapping your cheese log, leave approximately 2-3cm of space between the ends of the cheddar cheese and the edge of the havarti.
2. When slicing, cut these ends off and arrange like pickled ginger!

CUTE AS CAN FREAKIN' BE!

After dinner we went to Big Lots to pick up good-and-cheap Christmas wrapping supplies and what-not. Then we walked nextdoor to Trader Joe's and stocked up on foodstuffs. Carrie forgot her debit card, which makes it three times in the last three months that she's done that at Trader Joe's. Only at Trader Joe's. We figure there's some kinda curse in operation.

After we came home I helped her tag her jewelry (by printing out tags and earring cards and such). It was harder than it seemed, because I think my printer has just about had it. It started getting paper jams every single sheet of card stock that went through it. What do I want for Christmas? Hmm... I wonder. Oh well.

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while: Mario Unleashed - Google Video

Thanks to Jeremiah for pointing the way to it.

An evil corporation was trying to find some ancient Chinese dragon blood so that the greedy and cruel CEO could infuse himself with it and therefore live forever. However, through some sort of accident I ended up getting infused with it, which enabled me to tranform into a huge (100 meters long or so) white Chinese dragon. The CEO realized that some random guy (me) had accidentally gotten the dragon blood, and so sent out squads of goons to find me.

In order to hide from the evil corporation that was hunting me, I found a young girl who had chronic nightmares and hid in her dreams, where I would fight off her nightmares. It was a symbiotic relationship; nobody could find me in her dreams (obviously), and I helped get rid of her nightmares. Her mother was also an important character. I think she was kind of like my love interest, but I know she was also distrustful of me as well for some reason.

Eventually the CEO managed to synthesize more dragon blood, since the real stuff had been in his lab. But the synthesized blood was unstable. It transformed him into an insane black Chinese dragon that was only a raving monster. But the synthesized blood was close enough to real blood that the CEO could sense that I was hiding in this girl's dream, and so the black dragon burst out of the corporation's skyscraper and flew towards the girl's house.

I could sense the evil dragon coming, and knew that it was going to kill the girl to get to me, so I had to leave the girl's dreams very suddenly. I fought the evil black dragon in a big battle in the sky, but it was so ferocious that it managed to slash three deep gashes on the left side of my dragon face and knock me out of the sky and back into human form. With me out of commission the CEO flew back towards the little girl's house with the intention of killing her so that I couldn't escape back into her dreams. I, however, managed to summon the fortitude to transform back into the white dragon, and I flew past the enraged black dragon and got to the girl's house first.

In order to protect the girl I had to abduct her, much to the chagrin of the girl's mom. From her point of view a giant white dragon with three huge gashes in its face suddenly flew from out of nowhere, reached into her daughter's room and flew off with her. Very traumatic for the mom, but the girl recognized me as the dragon from her dreams and so assumed that she was dreaming. I played along and told her that I was here to protect her from a nightmare—the raplidly approaching black dragon.

(Interestingly, the little girl was the only person who could understand me when I was a dragon, since I couldn't actually speak English in that form. I think our dream-link gave us a limited form of telepathy or something like that)

The black dragon managed to catch up with me as I was flying away with the girl and we fought another titanit battle. But the synthesized black dragon blood started to break down and the black dragon started to freak out. As the sun rose I managed to wrap myself around it boa-constricter-style and squeeze it to sleep. It fell to the ground in a big field and transformed back into the CEO, who was quickly picked up by his underlings.

Exhausted, I floated gently to the ground with the little girl and transformed back into my human form. The mom came running up and was tearfully relieved that her daughter was okay. She started to thank me, because she thought that I was just some guy who found her, but then she noticed that my human face had three huge scars across it that looked exactly like the scars on the face of the dragon that "kidnapped" her daughter. She slapped me and started screaming at me to stay away. But then the little girl intervened and said that I was a goodguy because in her "nightmare" I was a dragon and I saved her from an evil dragon. She still thought it was all just a dream!

The mother realized that I actually saved her daughter and so reluctantly thanked me, but she didn't want anything to do with me until she realized that I was also the one who was helping the girl fight off her dream nightmares. The mom and I formed an uneasy truce where I was allowed to go into the girl's dreams to help her with her nightmares, but if I ever put her in danger again the mom would kill me.

Back at the corporation, the evil CEO revealed that he had no memory of being the monstrous black dragon. The synthesized blood was declared a failure, but the CEO said that that's okay; they'll just try again and again until they get it right...

Wow! At that point I woke up, went to the bathroom, and then came back to bed, where I had this dream:

I was now friends with special guest star David Duchovny. He was exhausted with work, and so I brought him into the little girl's dreams with me so he could be entertained by watching me fight off her nightmares. This particular nightmare was a big, round, gorilla-like thing. The setting was a lot like something out of Batman Begins. It was in an old wooden building and during our fight we kept on crashing through walls and floorboards and stuff like that.

The next day, back at the evil corporation where I was an employee (somewhat of an assistant to the evil CEO), they'd been trying for a couple of months now to synthesize dragon blood, but their three test subjects didn't respond right; none of them turned into dragons. It made one only able to see a pinkish-beige color. Another was hospitalized with some other symptoms. I recognized all these as partial dragon traits. The CEO was now hiding the fact that the back of his right hand had a subtly scaly pattern on it.

Unfortunately I woke up at this point, so I don't know how the rest of the episode went. But I have a feeling that the television series would work like a monster-of-the-week show, where the test subject for the synthesized dragon blood would turn into some sort of monster that I would have to fight at the end of the episode.

My dream people are AWESOME.

Labels: Dreams

In the second dream I was a defense lawyer. My law partner and I were defending a murder suspect. The plaintiff was Carrie, my wife. Nobody seemed to think this was a conflict of interest (including Carrie), except that I wasn't allowed to question Carrie if she ever took the stand. That was it.

The prosecution called their witness, and he was this total asshole. He tried to tell his version of the story, but I was questioning him and I kept forcing him to have physical proof of every single thing he said. Like he said that he and and defendent went to a particular store, and bought something. But he didn't have a receipt, and my client denied going there. So where was the proof that my client had gone there with the witness?

Eventually the witness got so angry at me that he stormed out of the courtroom into an elevator.

"Your honor," I said, "I'd like that man held in contempt of court."

"Hmm," said the judge. "Yeah, I'd say so."

"Oh, and I wasn't done with my quetioning."

"You'll have to take it up again at a later time."

Then there was a recess, and everyone crammed into a little break room that was like a theater dressing room, with lighted mirrors and crappy catering.

My Mario Kart DS Friend Code:
004354
558412

If you'd like to race me at Mario Kart DS, please tell me your friend code as well. Eitherdrop me a line or just post it in the comments (if you don't mind anybody else knowing it). If we both happen to be playing WFC we could race each other!

That's what Leah and I did. I sat in a gorgeous cafe with live music, drinking Moroccan Mint tea, and playing Mario Kart DS with a friend who was many, many miles away. We played two games—we tied the first time and I soundly won the second.

Then Leah had to go to have dinner, so I played some games with random opponents from around the world. And I won all five of them.

This is the "killer app" for which the DS has been waiting almost a year. <Millenium Falcon>It's really cool knowing that you're actually racing real people somewhere out there in cyberspace.</Millenium Falcon>

I'll probably only be able to go on WFC Tuesday & Thursday evenings while Carrie is at class. Until I get my house hooked up wirelessly, that is. But I can't really justify doing that until I get a laptop. A real laptop.

After I got home and played a couple of rounds it was already time to pick Carrie up and take her back to the dentist. Yes, back to the dentist again. I got to play Mario Kart in the waiting room, though, instead of reading my usual The Mote in God's Eye. Carrie is going to need FIVE teeth pulled out. Two days before Christmas. Christmas is gonna be some doped-up fun this year!

After I brought Carrie back home, the rest of the day was basically spent alternating working and playing Mario Kart. I worked a lot more than I played. And I ate a lot of pizza, too. I actually ended up staying up until 1:30 in the AM working so hard. It was pretty cool. No, wait. Tiring. It was pretty tiring. But it was cool in that I haven't had THAT much work in a long time.

I remember thinking yesterday that there was something or other I wanted to blog about, but now there's no way I'm gonna remember.

Chris's Words of Advice: Don't get into medical assisting unless you're at least partially passionate about helping people feel better. Otherwise you just SUCK DONKEY BALLS!

In the afternoon I started prepping for my big work today, which is adding an actual weight to all of the products for sale at TheBeadFactory.com (and I do mean ALL of the products. It's gonna take me most of today. Hopefully it won't keep me up late. But the good thing is it's gonna make me bank). Then in the late afternoon I went down to the BF so Melissa could help me setup the shipping options for the shopping cart thing. It took me about an hour to get it all hooked up, but it works now, and it works rather well. It won't be online until late Tuesday night, though, so if you order something before then it'll still be with the old system.

Carrie called me at the store and wanted me to bring her home a milkshake, so I stopped by Jack in the Box and got a Punkin Pie Milkshake for her and a Sourdough Jack for me. When I pulled up to the window the girl there handed me the shake, and then a minute later brought the bag to the window. She looked in it and said, "You ordered a Sourdough Jack, right?"

"That's right," I said.

She looked really embarrassed. "I'm sorry, I had them make you a Sourdough Chicken Sandwich by accident."

She had me pull into the parking lot and shortly thereafter brought me out a bag with a Sourdough Jack in it. "I also put a free cheesecake in there," she said while making the "shhh" sign with a finger in front of her lips.

When I brought the food home Carrie said, "It makes sense that you would buy something for yourself, but I didn't think of that, so I ordered us each a pizza." So I had a hamburger and a slice of pizza for din-dins. HEALTHY!!!

In the evening I watched some of the Eddie Guerrero tribute on Monday Night Raw, which was nice. Kurt Angle & Shelton Benjamin had a pay-per-view-main-event-quality match. Everyone had nice things to say about Eddie, and they weren't all just about how passionate he was for the business, and about how "wrestling was his life," as you too often hear about dead wrestlers. Rey Mysterio, Jr. and HBK also had a really interesting match.

Anyhoo. I also played a bunch of Runescape whenever I got too stressed out during the day.

He was probably set to win it, too. I'm kinda in shock about this.

I was fighting a headache all day, despite taking the Tylenol. But when Carrie got home, it was much to my surprise that she was absolutely as sick as a dog! Weird! She had flu-like symptoms: headache, chills, aches, stuffy nose. But thankfully no nausea.

Album Review: Shut Up... The Grownups Are Talking

In the PM I drove to Olympia to do Fools Play. It was a really excellent show: Lookin' for Love. In the opening scene I played a Dodo bird. I completely busted up Geoff, and at one point I made Taisha burst out laughing: Mike (a Flamingo or something like that) was looking at a family tree.

MIKE: Wow, look at this tree! It says all birds are related; that we all came from the Great Egg.

ME: And we all go to the Great Grave!

That was pretty much it for Taisha, but then later in that same conversation I followed up with:

MIKE: Wow, this family tree is an amazing find!

ME: I made it!

It was a really high-energy night, and we got the crowd to repeatedly do a very complicated chant with hand motions and everything, and they all did it and enjoyed it every time. It included the phrases "Love Match!" and "F-ed up Magic Show!" and screaming "NOOOOOOO!" like Darth Vader at the end of Episode III, as well as a dance about living in the "dogloo," and doing the "quote" symbol with your fingers as if you were exercising.

Afterwards EVERYBODY went to Red Robin (almost everybody). I sat next to a huge Asian guy named Alex who was in the military. He had scars all over his arms.

While we were at the Robin it started to rain really hard. Just pour. The drive home was really scary, because half the time my tires were spinning 'round and 'round without actually gripping the pavement. By the time I got home (which took a long time because I couldn't drive over 55 without sliding all over the place) I was all tense and had a headache from concentrating on driving so hard. But Clone High was on in the bedroom, so all was good, baby!

We then drove up to Federal Way to Marie Calendar's, where we were meeting my family for din-dins. Carrie & I were the first ones there, and they didn't have a record of any Harris reservation, even though I could have sworn my mom said she'd made a reservation. Turns out she did. They just didn't have it.

Whoops!

We didn't have to wait all that too long to be seated (only about a half hour). I ordered a gorgonzola bacon burger. They brought me a guacamole bacon burger.

Whoops!

But grandma had a coupon that gave six of the seven of us free pie after dinner. Still, the whole dinner thing took two frikkin' hours. By the time we got to my folks' house it was after 8:30! Jeez!

Carrie & I came home almost immediately after presents were opened. But we didn't come home empty-handed. We came home with my brother's copy of Clone High, which we put on in the bedroom.

Julian & I played quite a bit of this, but then Trevor started feeling not-well again. When Carrie came back we all packed up and went back home.

That evening after everyone had gone to bed (including Carrie) I played a good amount of World of Warcraft. I find it a surprisingly enjoyable game, although the getting-from- place-to-place part of it is rather bo-ring. There's not automatic navigation, either; all they had to do was make it so that you could click on the map and your character would head automatically to that spot. Instead you can only click on the ground you can actually see on screen, which makes it tedious if you want to walk a couple of game miles to a neighboring town or something.

Anyway. Yesterday (Thursday) Carrie went to work while I stayed with Trevor. She came back around noon-ish, and shortly thereafter Missa came and took over kid-watching duties from us, so we went home.

AMC was showing a tonne of Halloween movies, so I actually watched most of Halloween IV. I picked up Carrie at 3:30, then around 4:00 I started the soup. What soup? Why, potato, green bean, and sauerkraut soup! Carrie went and picked up Grandma K from Federal Way, and because of the rain and more rain there was an accident, so it took her 45 minutes to get there (should only take 20-25 mins).

Anyway, she got home and I started making Reuben sammitches to go with the soup. The soup and the sammitches both had sauerkraut in them, so it kinda tied the whole meal togetha. Carrie worked on the dessert, which was baked apple slices.

Carrie's mum & pa came over to join us for din-dins while we gave out our King-Size candy to the Trick-or-Treaters. It didn't seem like we had quite as many as last year; we figure the rain kept a few people away. 'Cause it was sporadically crazy out there.

Linnea, Jay, and Lena stopped by so they could show off Lena's Cinderella costume, which we'd bought her at Disneyland. Very cute. Taisha also stopped by with her god-child. She had a different costume than she did on Saturday! She was dressed as someone who had been killed in a pillowfight and came back as a zombie. I sh-t you not.

Anyway, din-dins was really tasty, because I MADE IT. Dessert was really tasty, too, 'cause Carrie served the baked apples over vanilla iced cream.

A while after her folks left and took Grandma K with them, Catherine O'Reilly came over to watch Laguna Beach with Carrie. That meant that I went into a different room. The bedroom in this case, where I put away laundry and watched the last part of a documentary about the making of the first three Star Wars films. it had a lot of cool footage that I hadn't seen before (but I don't own the Star Wars DVDs, so it could all be on there for all I know). Then I watched an episode of Home Movies. By that time Laguna Beach was almost over, so I came out of hiding. Cat left and Carrie & I went to bed shortly thereafter.

Oh, I almost forgot! I promised to show you my costume, didn't I? Well, here it is: