Category Archives: Hchom

And here’s the cafe menu. If I could wake up every morning, and stumble downstairs to be presented with brisk coffee and a softboiled egg with buttered toast soldiers… well. It would be hard to find fault with life.

And here’s some store inventory, as promised. It’s like a yuppified version of Bilbo’s larder, isn’t it? Well, there’s no hiding from yourself.

Cafe menu tomorrow.

I don’t expect I’ll ever own property. And as a comic artist, this is a prudent belief. But there’s this house down the street from me, and dude! It is clearly meant to be mine. It has two tiny businesses at the bottom, which in my version of things would be filled by a cafe and some kind of all-purpose shiny-hunter’s adventure market. Brandon could have the first floor, and I could have the second. Why can’t this just happen? Why I can’t I have a magical pony and a million dollars?

Anyway. Tomorrow I’ll put up my Goblin Market inventory. The universe may never provide, but I’ll keep hinting all the same.

I’ve got this salad fixation, lately. It’s a totally unexpected turn of events, since for the past decade I’ve been carrying around a firm conviction that salads are something people inflict on themselves as part of some unpleasant dieting ritual. How wrong I was!

So this is my “crunky salad”, and what I’ve been eating nearly daily (at least at the beginning of every week, while the allowance is still holding up). Note that I often add a hard-boiled egg, making it, I guess, a kind of Oyako-salad.

P.S. I’m not sure why I chose a Badger as my proponent of the crunky salad, because that makes no sense at all. Blame Brandon, who is a strange badger fanatic.

I think I mentioned already that I have a fancy wedding I have to go to in August, and the fact that I have no formal clothes (or formalish, even) has become a total daily fixation. So this is the kind of androgynous gentlewoman look that, ideally, I would like to show up in. All I really need is very expensive pants. Isn’t it the right of every human being to have very expensive pants (don’t think about it too hard)?

Also, I wish this shiny-holding leather pouch actually existed. I have an ongoing daydream that I’ll someday meet the amazing local leatherworker Tannis Hegan, and convince her to take a commission for one.

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Since I did it last year, I thought I’d better make a birthday list. I’ve ordered it from most reasonable to least reasonable (approximately). I leave it to you to judge where it crosses over from one to the other, but the curve starts getting rapidly steeper starting at about #5 (which is where my realistic hopes and expectations end).

I’ll leave it there, before I start getting into giant plushy Turian territory. Nobody wants that.

Some while back, a commenter challenged me to list my four favourite breads. Now, after much hardship and personal sacrifice, I have chosen five (one more for the cheap seats).

Having prepared this list, I’ve also decided that I should add a Vancouver section to Hchom, keeping track of my favourite bakeries/restaurants/whathaveyou. Ideally, it might be of use to somebody visiting or living in Vancouver. At the very least, it gives my obsessive documentation of baked goods some kind of official sanction.

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Whenever possible, I like to arrange meals as fantasy adventure snacks. Perfectly normal, right? The above represents approximately the ideal fantasy adventure spread, but usually I make do with what I’ve got on hand. Streamwater, sadly, not a commodity of city life.

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May has been a propitious month for gifts and tasty things and people generally being much nicer to me than I remotely deserve (though I’ve spent the second half of it pretty exclusively hiding under my bed covers, reading the Game of Thrones books and avoiding my email). I’m even too abashed to go on at length about how my birthday is in two weeks, and I want five thousand things including several devoted pie thralls and at least one wish-granting pony. I’ve gotten out of the habit of carrying my camera everywhere, but here’s what my memory card has yielded thus far.

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I’m on the homestretch of a big deadline right now, which means total exhaustion and general uselessness at anything not deadline-related. But I’m not too useless to talk about wanting shinies.

I very rarely wear or buy jewelery, but I often walk past jewelry displays, and fantasize about prying all the stones off the settings. You know, for my hoard.

A good shiny amulet could change my mind, however. I’ve had my eye on these for a while (it’s hard to avoid them, as they are beloved by the internet), but even ignoring the impossible price, the bullet casings are something that teenage Marian would be very enthusiastic about, but adult Marian less so.

More recently, I found the designer Stone and Honey, who makes, as you can see, the most perfect shiny amulets ever. Look, they are some serious contemporary minimalistic wizard-thief gear. Also, mine! Want! The woman who designs them is very nice, and has agreed to keep an eye out for some black tourmaline, in view of a custom order. Rent and food be damned, people, there are shinies to be had.

And now back to work.

For the first time in several years, I won’t have an enormous, distracting external deadline during the summer. Consequently, I am romanticising the living piss out of it. Also, perhaps you didn’t know, but a person can’t function properly unless they get adequate sunshine on their ankles. What, you’ve never heard of ankles needing sunshine? Well Mighty Science says so, so don’t talk back.

All roads lead to wanting, and what I need in order to both properly enjoy my summer of freedom and not die slowly from lack of sunlight absorption are these N.D.C. sandals. Because if I have to spend one more summer walking for hours at a time with my feet boiling in my closed shoes, well, I will not be pleased. And before you say anything about these being, like, girl sandals or something, check out how they raise your evasion. And to completely justify this want, as if I hadn’t already, I’m attending a wedding in August and somehow I expect that my three pairs of beat-up, fray-laced shoes won’t quite cut it.

They are simple and perfect, yes? Case closed? Happy birthday Marian?

I have a fine collection of old videogame maps. Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, Zelda: A Link to the Past, etc. They are nerd gold, well besmeared from hard use, ripped-up and taped back together again. I’ve been wanting to frame them for something like the last fifteen years, but even half-decent frames are so expensive that I’ve never been able to do it.

This is an ongoing want, though. A patient want. Many want-lists into the future, it will still be there, wanting away quietly.

Continuing with (somewhat) practical wants, I would like some really excellent T-shirts. The kind you encounter about once a decade, and you wear them until they’re falling off your back, all the while wishing you’d bought ten more.

The shirt on the left is my Ultimate Marian Shirt. It doesn’t exist, as far as I know. But sons of twelve bitches, do I ever want it. One in every increment of grey. The UMS of my imagination has longer sleeves than your average t-shirt, and a narrow body, very elongated. I’ve never seen anything like it in person. Searching on the internet, this comes quite close – it’s a beautiful line, SILENT by Damir Doma, even if it is beyond my means. I’d take one of those in every increment of grey, too. As consolation, you understand.

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Well, here’s an unimpressive beginning. I wish I could say that this was a thrice-cursed demon-hunter’s dagger, but no. It’s just a bread knife.

I eat a lot of bread, you see. A good loaf of bread will carry you through the week, no problem. It won’t let you go hungry. It will tenderly sing you to sleep at night. And using a bad bread knife is like repaying a friend by hacking it into crumbling, uneven slabs that fall apart when you pick them up. Nobody would fault me for buying a new one, but right now that is sixty dollars I cannot spare.

So here I am, daydreaming about breadknives. It’s shameful, but what can I do.

Brandon and I have just moved apartments, which explains the lack of posting. This month is also unusually deadline-heavy. With a rare and excellent kind of deadline, fortunately – that is, the kind that doesn’t make you hate your life when it’s 4am and you still aren’t finished for the day. But deadlines are still deadlines, you know? Angry gods that demand ritual cosy behaviour and frequent sacrifices of many baked goods.

And there’s something about the combination of both immediate deadlines, and emergent move-related nesting instincts. It results in unusually strong material wants. Like two waves in phase meeting at the crest to produce one giant wave of selfish, selfish, shrieking yearning. So I think that I’m actually going to have to put aside the month of April, and dedicate it to all the things I want.

Guys. It is a lot of things.

So let’s start. First of all, and perhaps most reasonably, I’d really like a package. The above assortment: many fine little things that would pair well with some hefty, familiar fantasy novel from my childhood. I’d demand that my sister make it for me, but that would be a dick move just right now as she’s flying to Prague in a week for a forestry conference. Prague! Damn that girl.

It would be a dick move, right? Probably? It probably would.