Not too darned bad.
Click to de-smallify.
The texture is sourdough-ish, lots of small holes and the texture reminds me more of an english muffin than loaf bread. Ever so slightly doughy, not unpleasantly so. It rose very well and the crust is exceptionally good, really crunchy. I think it could have benefited from a little more heat in the initial baking, I chickened out and dropped the oven from 500 to 475 degrees because the pan was smoking. Next time I'll keep the oven at 500 as recommended. This is my fourth bread experiment, and I still have not been able to top the very first loaf I made, which was droolingly good. Can't seem to replicate whatever I did there.
Pirate Festival was fun, but weird. There were more than a few swashbucklers who seemed...a little too into it, if you know what I mean. A few Johnny Depp types were wandering around trying to catch the eye of certain buxom wenches. Geordie was slated to read from his book at a bad spot in the evening, late in the night when things were getting rowdier and louder. He did a really admirable job of keeping a bunch of drunken pirate-wannabees engaged for five minutes or so, but he lost them in the end due to nothing but his placement in the night. He had asked the organizers to let him go on earlier in the line-up, but amongst the hub-bub I think his request got lost in the shuffle.
Walking around Fort York with all of the merch tents, face painting stations etc. really took me back to a certain chapter in my musical past. I spent a few years in a band called the Fletcher Valve Drummers, and most of our gigs at the time were at outdoor festivals exactly like this one. Having our drum heads de-tune themselves in the humidity and trying to locate electricity so we could unleash the hair dryer on them, trying to top "Doodlebops" or "Barney" on stage at some kid-oriented thing, having some Phish/Deadhead type lad get so excited during our set that he jumped onstage and grabbed my drum out of my hands and started playing it, various and sundry substances imbibed in ... good times. Weird times. One of my favorite memories is showing up at a (post-Garcia) Greatful Dead concert* we were booked at, having been told to report at "the teepee". Much wandering in and out of teepees ensued, asking stoned biker after stoned biker where we could find "Jim", or whoever the organizer was. We never found Jim and never played. In that band of crazy characters I had my first proper studio recording experience and my first real on-stage performances. That band also represents my first feelings of the pure bliss that is improvising with other musicians when the chemistry is hot. Damn, that's hard to find.
Nowadays, I rock out with these folks and it's a whole different thing. Much more sensible ;)
*Re-reading the last few sentences, I feel it imperative to note, for the record, that I am not now nor have I ever been a Deadhead. My Fletcher Valve Drummers time was a brief window into that world and I left with more disdain for that culture than when I entered it. As someone more clever than myself once said, "you can't rock in Birkenstocks".
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