Time to crowdsource this pork loin.

It’s definitely going in an oven around 4 PM EST. There’s also two russet potatoes that will be roasted tonight, and probably a salad for greenstuff. The question becomes, what specifically happens to the pork loin?

My inclination is to salt-and-honey that sucker, get all Roman Empire up on it. My wife and I threw a Roman-themed toga party once* where she had the pork roasted up like that, and it was choice. But I don’t have the recipe, so it might not come out right.

Thoughts? Bear in mind that the clock is ticking.

Continue reading Time to crowdsource this pork loin.

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10/28/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

This story needs more action.

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A search of the room revealed quite the collection of volumes, maps, and ephemera from Boston’s millennium and more of history, including a remarkable number of pre-Discovery maps of the Antiquity. Some of those did look like they were originals, but they were in excellent condition all the same. “I assume this was what he was using for his ghost hunts,” Curwin observed, and I shrugged. It seemed reasonable.

But there were no obviously arcane artifacts, except for the ones that any educated citizen of the Republic might reasonably have. We were looking for something more powerful than charms against toothache or lost buttons, however, and it worried me that we found nothing. Why on Earth had Shane gone down there? A ghostlegger would presumably know where he could set up his traps. His murder at least suggested that he had a reason for his actions.

It was Curwin who discovered our first real clue. “Hold up,” he said after a half hour’s useless searching. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.”

“We are certainly not looking at this right,” I admitted. “Go ahead. Even if you’re still feeling out what is nagging at you.”

10/27/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.

I kind of like these characters.

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“I would have thought the wages of sin would have stretched farther,” I observed as Curwin and I assessed the late David Shane’s apartment. No, that is not true. I sniffed, and regretted it instantly. I have an inclination to dismiss, and I dislike that about me. It is a bad state of mind for a necromancer to fall into.

Fortunately, Curwin did not notice. Or else he agreed with me, because indeed this was not a very imposing domicile. This part of Boston was hardly fashionable; a hundred years ago it was just past the edge of the suburbian wildness that we are still clearing, seven hundred years after the end of the First Republic. Now it was a collection of badly-aging cheap apartments and stolid factories, providing shelter, wages, and nothing more. Not the sort of place I would associate with an antiquarian, however self-taught.

Curwin chuckled when I pointed that out. “Think of it this way, Mistress Dexter. For every dollar he saved on rent, he could buy another book.” He opened the door to what I thought was a bedroom, and whistled. “Many, many books.”