I’ve been waiting for autumn to begin, as usual, since early July. This year I tried to embrace the full summerness of things, but I couldn’t really manage it. Autumn is when the adventures begin – when the shinies, deep in their caverns, are waiting to be pried loose and carried home.

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This is a Bedford Jacket. It’s made by Engineered Garments, which is a brand I love – and a menswear brand, all the better. I have a winter coat by them, altered to fit my lady torso, and it’s the best coat ever. So what I want now, since what we have is never good enough (and really, the coat is getting a bit worn at the cuffs…), is a version of this Bedford jacket in a heavy wool flannel (and a nice dark navy, if you please).

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find it anywhere – only hints that it exists this season. I’ve seen it in navy cotton canvas, and in navy wool serge, but not in the flannel. This is where having some kind of jacket agent in New York would be helpful, I expect. Jacket agents! Why isn’t that a real thing?

Also, while I’m free and easy with the unreasonable demands, I’d like some bright yellow gentlemen shoes. For my Urban-Dandy-Tom-Bombadil cosplay project, you understand.

I wasn’t planning on putting this up, but my other posts are all in a state of half-completion, so why not.

I drew these a little while ago, after playing through Dragon Age 2 a second time. I wanted to make my own version of an armour item pack, more reminiscent of the classic RPGs from my childhood which I now regard with all the unreasonable nostalgia that nearly two decades can create. Kids these days, and their new-fangled pointy-pauldroned gratuitously buckled armour! They just don’t know how it was back then, trudging uphill both ways through 8-bit pixel forests. Have some respect for your elders!

Anyway. Item pack and stuff. You might recognize the quilted armour on yonder rogue, because I draw it at every opportunity. I’ve also been playing mage-type characters lately, and with particular enjoyment in this game, except that I keep coming up against the fancy dressy lady mage issue (to be fair, this is probably only an issue for me). Can’t we have some nice, gender-neutral robes? For some reason I don’t often play warriors. I also never seem to make blonde characters, so I combined the two in this version.

Normally I’d save this level of geekery for my private affairs, but I can’t help but obsess.

And here’s the cafe menu. If I could wake up every morning, and stumble downstairs to be presented with brisk coffee and a softboiled egg with buttered toast soldiers… well. It would be hard to find fault with life.

And here’s some store inventory, as promised. It’s like a yuppified version of Bilbo’s larder, isn’t it? Well, there’s no hiding from yourself.

Cafe menu tomorrow.

I don’t expect I’ll ever own property. And as a comic artist, this is a prudent belief. But there’s this house down the street from me, and dude! It is clearly meant to be mine. It has two tiny businesses at the bottom, which in my version of things would be filled by a cafe and some kind of all-purpose shiny-hunter’s adventure market. Brandon could have the first floor, and I could have the second. Why can’t this just happen? Why I can’t I be the Queen of Sheba and have a million dollars?

Anyway. Tomorrow I’ll put up my Goblin Market inventory. The universe may never provide, but I’ll keep hinting all the same.

I’ve got this salad fixation, lately. It’s a totally unexpected turn of events, since for the past decade I’ve been carrying around a firm conviction that salads are something people inflict on themselves as part of some unpleasant dieting ritual. How wrong I was!

So this is my “crunky salad”, and what I’ve been eating nearly daily (at least at the beginning of every week, while the allowance is still holding up). Note that I often add a hard-boiled egg, making it, I guess, a kind of Oyako-salad. And if I were the Queen of Sheba and had a million dollars, I’d add bacon and avocado as well.

P.S. I’m not sure why I chose a Badger as my proponent of the crunky salad, because that makes no sense at all. Blame Brandon, who is a strange badger fanatic.

I think I mentioned already that I have a fancy wedding I have to go to in August, and the fact that I have no formal clothes (or formalish, even) has become a total daily fixation. So this is the kind of androgynous gentlewoman look that, ideally, I would like to show up in. All I really need is very expensive pants. Isn’t it the right of every human being to have very expensive pants (don’t think about it too hard)?

Also, I wish this shiny-holding leather pouch actually existed. I have an ongoing daydream that I’ll someday meet the amazing local leatherworker Tannis Hegan, and convince her to take a commission for one.

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Since I did it last year, I thought I’d better make a birthday list. I’ve ordered it from most reasonable to least reasonable (approximately). I leave it to you to judge where it crosses over from one to the other, but the curve starts getting rapidly steeper starting at about #5 (which is where my realistic hopes and expectations end).

I’ll leave it there, before I start getting into giant plushy Turian territory. Nobody wants that.

Some while back, a commenter challenged me to list my four favourite breads. Now, after much hardship and personal sacrifice, I have chosen five (one more for the cheap seats).

Having prepared this list, I’ve also decided that I should add a Vancouver section to Hchom, keeping track of my favourite bakeries/restaurants/whathaveyou. Ideally, it might be of use to somebody visiting or living in Vancouver. At the very least, it gives my obsessive documentation of baked goods some kind of official sanction.

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