Back in 2014 I started playing Candy Crush. It became a habit. And apparently the other day I hit 4000 levels so they sent me a badge and a congratulatory email.

You are truly among the elite – getting to level 4000 is no easy feat! Well done, and keep up the excellent work!

Beating this many levels puts you firmly in the exclusive top 4% of players! So to celebrate, here’s your Level 4000 Badge – wear it with pride!

Proudly I have never bought anything nor used any of their “community” features. I suppose as habits go, its not the worst one I could have.

I have a long history with Rocky Racoon… probably one of the few songs I actually know all the words to. And I’ve always had a picture of how it looks in my mind  So this just amused me to no end — all it’s missing is the doctor, stinking of gin…

More from Todd Alcott Graphics

I just realized I never finished last year’s posts (I didn’t even finish any videos!). I will fill things in, I promise, but we are back aboard enjoying some time in Victoria. Short trip this year, only a month—and two weeks of that in Victoria. But enjoyable so far nonetheless.

Here’s what our mornings looks like this week.

And our new custom cutting board courtesy of my brother. I still haven’t decided if we will leave it on board or not.

—Bruce #Posts

I felt my first earthquake.

Cool.

…and I have a cold. Yesterday xkcd post a most appropriate comic.

https://xkcd.com/2714/

My colleagues in Victoria were complaining about their weather this morning:

“Yuk!”

But I think I win.

December 12, 2017

That’s the day I baked my first loaf, 5 years ago, with sourdough starter I that I had barely got started — and that starter is still going strong. Here’s a post I wrote in January 2018 about the first couple of experiments using that starter. Spoiler: they were mainly duds.

My poor starter has gone though a lot: from being moldy, to almost starving after a months alone; it even made the journey to BC in air-cargo this past spring and I baked a bunch of loaves on board before bringing it home and reuniting it with the stuff that had sat neglected in the fridge for two month. Still, it has been 5 years and I guess the poor thing deserves some recognition on having made it through all that …as well as periods of me not baking much, a pandemic, a switch from white flour to rye flour, and back again—and then back to rye once more. It’s been almost dried, lived as a swampy sludge, underfed, overfed, developed some weird skins and spent a lot of time in the refrigerator beside the silk screen chemicals. But so far it seems it’s pretty impossible to kill.

And it’s made a lot of loaves along the way. Here’s some pics from over the years:

But it doesn’t really matter

The problem is that actually the bacteria/microbes in sourdough just don’t live that long. So really, the whole “old sourdough starter passed down for generations” thing is just a myth. But at least it’s a tasty one. Here’s a link to an article that explains the whole thing: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220711-the-worlds-oldest-sourdough

 

Addendum

I just found a note in my notebook dated Nov 29, 2017 with the sourdough starter recipe I used. So I guess the whole process was actually started a few weeks earlier than Dec 12.

Equity. Or Justice. Sometimes I just don’t know…