Ruin has come to our families

Today I'm exhausted after even more insomnia. I went to bed early after a string of bad nights where I slept fitfully and woke up from nightmares--I called in to work on Friday because I woke up from nightmares feeling awful--and then I had serious insomnia. I went to bed forty minutes early and fell asleep two hours later, and then woke up an hour before my alarm from nightmares that I can't remember anymore.

I could really use something to drive away all these nightmares.

Saturday was going to be character creation for mutantur's upcoming Masks of Nyarlathotep game, but due to various circumstances we decided to delay it for a few weeks and play another game instead. I voted on The Quiet Year, a game of building out a single peaceful year in the hardscrabble life of a post-apocalyptic settlement, and when I arrived, mutantur mentioned that he had acquired Betrayal Legacy, the legacy game version of Betrayal at House on the Hill, for Christmas from fin.emery and maybe we could play that. Betrayal is one of my favorite board games (I've owned it since 2006), and I've always wanted to play a legacy board game, so I immediately and enthusiastically signed on. So mutantur, fin.emery, and I sat down to play.

( Spoilers for Betrayal Legacy )

After we finished our three scenarios, it was the time when we would have normally quit anyway, so I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some ingredients before heading home to make dinner. Last time I went to my parents' house, they loaded me down with fish, including some fish they had gotten fresh from the local farmer's market. They told me one piece of salmon was sushi-grade, so there was no way I was going to salt that and make breakfast shiozake out of it. Before I left to play Betrayal Legacy I put the salmon in the fridge to slowly thaw, and when I came back I made some dashimaki, shaved some carrot, chopped up some shiitake, sliced the fish, added some vinegar to the rice, and put it all together:
( food photography )

It was incredibly good. Not as photogenic as I might like, since I'm not sushi chef and I'm no good at cutting raw salmon so it looks smooth and uniform. I added too much soy sauce to the dashimake and so it's all brown instead of a nice mottled golden-white. Whole Foods inexplicably stopped carrying daikon right when I finally actually needed it for something. There's obviously no way I can find shiso without scouring Asian markets. I should have overlapped the cucumber and not just dumped it all in parallel. But none of that mattered because it was delicious. I'm really sad that I had to cook the rest of that fish because it was already thawed and I couldn't just have it sitting around, and I was too full to eat like a pound of sushi fish.

Well, mostly thawed. Even after 10 hours in the fridge, the center was a tiny bit crunchy from ice. Maybe I should have taken it out the night before.

Still, this is the first time I've ever made chirashizushi and the third time I've ever made sushi (once when I lived in Ireland, once at a cooking class in Naperville with schoolpsychnerd, and now), and I'm happy with how it turned out. Next time I might wait until I have someone else to eat it with me so I can use the entire fish, though...

Today is the all-employee company meeting, and it's already had its running time cut in half. It's usually two hours but this year it's one hour, so that's a little concerning. On the other hand, maybe they're making the meeting more efficient to avoid the usual large meeting problem where most of the attendees don't care about any particular part of the presentation. And if we get cookies 🍪 like last year, then all is forgiven.

And hopefully I don't fall asleep with how tired I am...