1. Here is your silly-but-good improvised cocktail recipe for 2011. I am calling it a "Sonic Shark", mostly because I can:

Make a basic Sonic Screwdriver with lemon-lime soda, blue curaçao and plain vodka, without shaking or stirring. (If you want to do a non-alcoholic version, you could use the lemon-lime with blue raspberry soda and skip the vodka.)

Then add freshly-made whole pineapple juice, nice and pulpy, about as much as the curaçao and vodka combined. (The host of our NY party got a juicer for Christmas, you see. There has been much juicing in that house of late.) The pineapple pulp should nucleate the soda-pop, causing a sudden uprush of foam like a toy volcano, and it will also make the foam persistent, so that your drink keeps a head. Also the pineapple juice makes it yummy. :D

(Why yes, we have watched the DW Christmas special.)

2. Also finally went to see the latest Harry Potter movie yesterday. I was not unimpressed - I know you all have been saying it's good, and it was: it somehow managed to follow the book pretty much exactly and yet still make a good movie, which considering my mixed impressions of the book is saying something.

Mostly, though, it made me want to go on a long backpacking trip around Britain. (I was possibly the only person who read that book and said "I wish she'd gone into more detail on the camping!) :D Especially combined with the fact that I got A Walk in the Woods for Christmas and have read it already. (In which our author attempts to walk the Appalachian trail and spends a fair amount of time whining about how hiking in the US is so much harder than hiking in Europe. And he skipped my state entirely and *didn't even mention it*. BAH.)

Also, I spent most of my Christmas gift card money at Target on a 20°F 2.5 lb backpacker's mummy bag, marked down to half-price, which has only been on my wish list for years, and I have slept a night in it already, and we loves it, precious. (Now what is replacing it on my backpacking wishlist is a Kelly Kettle-type stove, but apparently Americans, being addicted as we are to fancy distilled-and-refined fuels, have no need of such things, because nobody seems to make them for us, which means my chances of finding a cheap used one are about zip, and the import ones are out of my budget >:| I have heard rumors that dirt-cheap samovars can be bought in some ethnic neighborhoods in big cities here but I bet they're all electric.)

Anyway I think my official goal for this year is to do a solo backpacking trip at least once. You know, once it is not winter any more.

The internets has refused to cough up a proper cocktail recipe for scumble, and so I wish to inform them that 80-proof apple jack mixed 50-50 with ginger beer is yummy, and it's also lethal, because my body seems to think it's apple soda and I drink entire gulps before I realize that it's actually rather distinctly alcoholic.

(The stash of drinks has no vodka, but my sister and Rachel Maddow together have made me interested in cocktails. So sister had sonic screwdrivers with tequila instead of vodka & I had moscow mules with applejack instead & called them scumble.)

(Actually we had vodka, but it's double-caffeinated espresso vodka. Our hostess has been drinking it straight for several hours and is now both lit and wired. How festive, just like her non-demoninational holiday shrub!)

We watched A Colbert Christmas and then have spent the past several hours watching DVDs of all the Otakon vid shows for the entire decade of the nineties (because the parties I go to are just that cool), including the very first vid I ever saw (which was Ryoga Hibiki doing I Would Walk 500 miles in 1995. btw.) I am thinking about how much those old-school AMVs, especially in the humor vids that had a particular way of using literal matching of lyrics & images while completely (deliberately) mismatching tone & mood, shaped my vid aesthetic. Or I would be if it wasn't three o'clock in the morning and I hadn't drunk quite so much scumble.

Also I appear to have crocheted a mauve Dalek.

Everybody who is here tonight drew a party spink. Three guesses which was mine and the first two don't count! Hint: it is the Doctor Who one.

Now I am waiting impatiently for yuletide reveals. Perhaps I will drink some sherry and then attempt to write fic!

My resolution for the year: I am going to start actually finishing creative projects instead of just talking about how awesome they would be if I actually finished them. (To aid me in doing that, I am going to do more talking about them, too.)

Also I am going to get a job. And make some money.

Am at bachelorette party at sister's apartment (not for her. or me.) and am watching marathon of wedding episodes. Have been forced to sit through more episodes of Friends than I ever have before in my entire life. Have had an epiphany (after only a moderate amount of drinking, I swear. Like three shots' worth or something) that the three annoying chicks on Friends are totally just the three girls from Apartment 3G. Have started referring to the black-haired bossy bitch as Margo, the blonde artsy wet-rag-type as LuAnn, and the other one who never really does much as Tommie. Sadly nobody else here reads http://joshreads.com , and so they have no clue what I'm talking about. Therefore, must tell internets! Only the girls in 3G have a much more interesting cast of supporting guy characters. And, like, ten times as much backstory to catch up on.

Of course I learned from Joshreads that Margo, Tommie and Luann were based on Joan Collins, Lucille Ball and Tuesday Weld. Pretending that it's them three onscreen instead makes it almost tolerable to watch!

PS: My sister would like the internets to know that she is really quite exceedingly drunk.

Also she says that I am not to tell any "liiiiees about me on the internet. s. internetses. Just don telll any lies on the internetseseses on me. kay? kay. ... Goodnight. Tell the internets I said goodnight. Tell Stephen Colbert I said goodnight. Good night!"

Chocolate is, of course, the perfect emergency food.

It has sugar for a rush of fast energy, it has fat for a slow burn of backup energy, it has things like caffiene and theobromide and cannabinoids to serve as painkiller, stimulant, and euphoric, and it has a whole bunch of vitamins and minerals and nutrients to help a person stay healthy and heal.

Hurricane season started - what, earlier this week? and we've already spent the last two days getting drowned by a tropical depression, so I was repacking my emergency bag in the closet. Just in case. And because I spent most of my childhood reading books about kids who were shipwrecked or lost or trapped or abandoned and I still kind of hope something like that happens to me someday. :D

I always stick in a couple bars of dark-dark chocolate, the kind that so dark it's bitter, (mostly because the really dark kind is less likely to melt in summer temperatures.) Because chocolate is the perfect emergency food. I learned that especially the time I spent a whole night as a tornado refugee with no food or shelter - chocolate makes everything better.

The weird thing is, a bunch of those books I read knew that. Our heroes would be wind-whipped, wet, hopeless and hungry, but somebody would have saved their chocolate bar to share, or somebody would have brough chocolate knowing that they would need it, and everyone would huddle up and break off a couple squares and be able to keep going. But those books were all published from, say, the early 20th century to the mid-sixties. The only book since then that I can think of that uses chocolate that way is Harry Potter.

Very weird. It's as if, as the awesome properties of chocolate are more and more acknowledged by science, they are less and less part of the folk knowledge.

Anyway, any heroes *I* write will always have emergency dark chocolate in their bags.

ETA: Chocolate neurochemistry.