I've begun stripping games for chrome. There's a hard core of games remaining that aren't worth selling online, I can't find anyone to donate them to, and they're just not worth staying in the collection. Luckily, most of them have useful bits. I've reclaimed about fifty dice (most from just one game), umpteen little race cars, little wooden cubes, play money in many fanciful denominations, etc. It's kind of an interesting exercise. The biggest disappointment was not finding anyone to take Merchants of Amsterdam off my hands. Upside: I now have a Dutch Auction clock, which I can surely use for something down the line. If I ever design a game with all this stuff--fifty dice, a Dutch Auction clock, little plastic Civil War men, eight kinds of play money, and race cars--it'll be a sure hit.
Something that's made this process easier is that, since the beginning of the Fall semester, I've taken up a new hobby: Baking. It's odd how that came about. There wasn't one day when I woke up and decided that I wanted to become a great baker. No: I woke up one morning and decided that I already was a great baker. A subtle difference. One demonstrates one's baking abilities by, of course, baking. So bake I have, with a vengeance. I bake up one or two or three treats of some sort per week--so far this week I've made a batch of (plain ol' Toll House) cookies, and I have a cranberry-cherry pie in the oven, ready to come out in about eight minutes. Toll House cookies are kind of interesting; they're the first really modern cookie recipe, and nobody has ever really matched them for chocolate chip cookies. They're easy to make, and people like them, so I make them fairly often. However, I also like to test my limits. Cheesecake is fun for that--can I make one without any cracks at all?--as was this one fancy pound cake (an interesting concept) I made back in December, and a divine pair of Crack Pies--the hot new pie concept from Momofuku--that took four hours to make but tasted like happiness and warm summer days.
One thing I've learned from baking is that simpler is quite often better. I started baking with a cheapo stand mixer. All kinds of things whirred around--two beaters, the bowl--there were all kinds of lights and digital buttons and Lord knows what else. I eventually replaced it with--remember, I'm a great baker--an expensive Kitchenaid, which has no lights, everything analog, and the mixing is accomplished with one moving part. Easy. So hard to do, though, that nobody's figured out a way to do it better, or cheaper.
Another fun thing about baking, for me, is that since I started baking I've lost forty pounds. I eat very little of what I make. One slice of each pie, three or four cookies for every three or four dozen, one or two slices of cheesecake, never more than one a day. I bake to see how good of a baker I am, and to provide for other people...and, I must admit, to see the positive feedback on people's faces when they dig in. I am not a man immune to such things, try as I might.
I've also discovered that many people won't eat vegan desserts if they know that's what they are. I don't bake vegan terribly often, but sometimes I'm asked to whip something up on short notice--not enough time to bring butter and eggs to room temperature. A few modifications will make something that's almost as good (with apologies to some of my readership), but made with vegetable oil. I usually make a little label for whatever it is I've made, but I've learned to not label things as vegan, even in the midst of a pretty liberal environment like a humanities department. (Although the other chief baker in the department dabbles in veganism...)
I also never quite realized how "gendered" home baking is. I got a magazine with reader-submitted baking recipes, and precisely three of the 168 recipes were submitted by men (or at least people with male-normative first names). Three! Meanwhile, the world of commercial baking (and celebrity baking on TV) is dominated by men. At one point I entertained a fantasy that baking would make me more attractive to women, but it's becoming clear that this is precisely the wrong move.
But no matter. I'm having fun, and people eat what I make. That'll do.
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