Sometimes being a geek that deep in the heart of monstre brings me to the strangest places.
The last peanut butter cookie experiment, while all several dozen of them were gobbled up, left me thoroughly disappointed in my baking abilities.
Some discussion with an infinitely helpful PB-Cookie connoisseuring Mr. Pyke brought up some helpful hints that stuck in my mind ever since then.
This evening, whilst still drowing in Semantic Web W3C definitions and playing with SOAP and XML and SAML and all sorts of toys that I'd forgotten about since Gemplus, I needed breathing space, and ended up playing in IRC.
In a recipe-swapping channel.
Looking for advice on the perfect PB cookie.
While describing it, and poo-poohing orange juice additions and vanilla droppings, some lady spoke up and I immediately imagined a thousand faces for her - a snowy-haired woman with apples in her cheeks highlighted by the glow of her monitor - a woman not a decade over my age with her hair tied back in a practical knot and skin too smoothe and brown for make-up, a woman in her forties in walmart clothing and a bad red dye job too bright for her skin with an apron hooked over her chair, stained with a thousand magical experiments that belie her unkemptness.
This lady then berated me for looking for a complex recipe when I keep repeating myself
"I just want it to taste like peanut butter"
"So cook peanut butter"
"Hunh? But it'll crumble...
But then I mix eggs with ground meat for hamburgers to keep them together, what if I mix an egg with the peanut butter..."
"Now you're getting it" she said, and I blew kisses to her thousand romaticized sets of cheeks and raced off dowstairs
to mix an egg with a cup of peanut butter and a fistful of sugar
and stick them in the oven for twelve minutes.
Upon his return from quite the eventuful dinner-meeting, Mr. Pyke announced that I didn't need to ask Steph for her recipe after all.
Once again, geek instincts prevail.
IRC has been there so many times for so many years...
...maybe I should mention that tomorrow.
At my first Torontonian interview.
After which I'll be racing home to change and head out to see a concert with MC that Marc and I have been anticipating for going on a decade now.
Right now I'm still stressing about the interview. The job is one I want too badly, the stakes too high, the probability of them deciding to go forward with the project far too low.
I want a practice interview. And a horseshoe up my ass.
In the meantime, though, I've got geek instincts, PB cookies that I don't even need to write down the recipe for (I'm just no good at following recipes) and a thousand bookmarks to review tomorrow morning.
C'mon brain. We've been doing good together so far...