Tiny Tea Dispatch #010

I’ve only been back from vacation a week and I’m already contemplating murder.
How’s everybody else doing?

~~ Watch report ~~

Last time, I briefly mentioned that I DID get a new watch (the Seiko Flightmaster, pictured on the left), well, I now also have a Seiko Samurai (the blue one on the right).
Hey now, I know how this looks like but I don’t have a problem! I don’t! I can quit anytime I want! This just means I have to sell 2 watches in order to balance things out.
One of those will be my old Russian watch (a Vostok) and the second one will be the… Flightmaster.

Okay, weird, I know, but hear me out! Why doesn’t anyone just hear me out?! It’s too small on my wrist, the buttons are too fiddly and it just doesn’t do it for me. So it’s going back out again.
Luckily, the Flightmaster is popular and slightly difficult to find, so I should get it off my hands easily enough.

~~ Writing ~~

I reworked the homepage on my website a bit and I’m using the blog again for smaller bits and pieces. It’s an effort to send out more things into the world on a regular basis. It might help me write the newsletters as well. For example, I can offload really long bits to the Blog and just link to it, or I can use the Blog to remember what in Dog’s name I’m gonna write about.
And hey, today’s edition comes only 2 months after the last one, so it seems to be helping!

Talking about the Blog, here are a couple things I added previously:

• A cartoon about the Flemish elections (probably won’t make sense to non-Belgians)
• Some idea generators I made and put online for anybody to use
• An apple, drawn on an Apple iPad
• I changed my username on Instagram because of reasons
• Some fan art

~~ Drawing~~

I’m still drawing on the iPad. Not as regularly as I would’ve liked (because my own head gets in the way) but it’s still happening.

In an effort to unblock myself, I’ve been taking some Skillshare tutorials about writing, creativity and drawing. If you haven’t got an account on that but thinking about it, here’s a referal code for 2 free months: https://skl.sh/2zCqcsD

What came out of it, are a couple sketches for future comics. Not sure when I’ll draw & post them yet. Hopefully before Inktober hits, but not sure yet.
 

~~ Travel ~~

I did bring the tablet with me on vacation to England and manage to do a few drawings. The one a little higher up, is from the Coal Drops Yard in London.

Booo was invited to a Scratch Conference in Cambridge and I helped man her booth there. She was there to talk about inclusion.

What is Scratch, you ask? It’s is a block-based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily at children. You can quickly and fairly easily make fun things with it, such as games or use it to program a robot.
The conference itself had a bunch of lectures by and with all manner of volunteers, teachers, professionals, … to talk and share what they are doing to introduce programming to kids, to bring more girls into it, to be more inclusive, …

We used the time before and after the conference to explore bits of London and Cambridge. And we met the world-famous Marcel Le Corgi

~~ Food ~~

Since the last experiments with hot sauce making, I’ve started fermenting peppers. I got a whole range of pepper breeds from an former colleague to try out, including Jalapeño, Habanero, Helix Nebula, Adji Pineapple, Pimento de Padròn and many others.
Right now I’m fermenting the Jalapeños, Helixes and Adji Pineapples. I suspect the Jalapeños are the only ones that will make it. The 2 other jars seem to have a problem with air getting in and so no real fermentation happening. It would be a real waste but we’ll see in a couple of days.

I just bought a PH-meter as well, stepping up my hot sauce making game with fermentation! Basically, I’ve started fermented my peppers to get more flavor out of it before turning them into sauce. It’s fairly easy, you just need some brine (3% salt), peppers, some flavoring (eg. chunks of garlic) and an airtight container you can release the gasses from every now and then (either manually, using a membrane or airlock). Keep everything in there under the water (you can use glass weights for example) & at a steady temperature, and you’re good to go.
Normal fermentation will create an environment with a pH of 4 to 4.2, meaning it’s acidic enough that the right bacteria can grow but stuff doesn’t rot.

Right now I have 3 jars going, in different sizes and for different kinds of peppers. Pictured below, was a first testing-jar I did, with 5-day old fermented Jalapeños. This time I’m going for 2 weeks!

That’s it for this issue. I’m going to try and avoid anything that can lead to incarceration or penalties. I hope you do the same.
We’re still owed a bit of summer, best try and take advantage of it I think.