Thursday This n That

Earlier, I saw some silly ditz 'digital content creator' saying that you don't have to be a writer to be an author.  Wuh?

Yesterday, I read a headline that went something like 'law students think tests are discriminatory' because they're too hard.  Like the person who posted the link said 'tests are supposed to help discriminate between the capable and the incapable', so yeah.

What is with all these words that people are putting asterisks into now?  I write a bunch of crime fiction, but words like rape, murder, killer, etc. are forbidden?  I don't even like putting asterisks in when I type fuck, I'm sure as hell not going to do it when I talk about rape or murder or killers.  Pardon me, but fuck that shit.

I wrote a note to FB in answer to their limiting my number of marketing posts.  Now, I don't seem to be getting the block, but I'm also not getting any reach.  Brilliant.  Wish in One Hand has traditionally flown out the door when I run a freebie.  I got 21 downloads the first day, then I wrote FB that note and the next day I got 4.  :eyeroll: :facepalm: :headdesk: 

Just got our Brightspeed 'final bill' thing.  They owe us $24.  It would've been nice if they'd just put in a check.  But no.  I'll most likely have to call them and struggle to get my credit back.  Fun.

I've been watching The IT Crowd.  It's pretty funny.  If you're a nerd, which I am.

I'm up to 50 miles walked for the year.  I posted that to FB and one of my friends (someone I've 'known' since like 2006 when I got my first blog) said something like 'well, you better turn around and go home'.  This is why we're friends.  LOL

If I wore jeans, I'd be buying myself a pair of American Eagle right now.  Sometimes I miss wearing jeans.  :shrug:

Dollar General has the best ice cream.  It's Caramel Swirl.  Caramel flavored ice cream with a ribbon of smooth caramel.  No chunks.  It's awesome.  I'm not a fan of chunks in my ice cream.

Got anything to add today?

Thursday This n That

Now that I have a phone substitute on its way here, the landline is working.  Like 5 days in a row now, which hasn't happened since like March.  Turds.  I'm waiting until I make sure the new device arrives and works before I cancel the old stuff.

I stopped by the old office yesterday.  They're in the same building as a company that provides us a service, so I stop to pay that bill.  Anyway, I saw one of the guys, which was awesome.  The other guy I wanted to see had the day off.  Bummer.  I spent some time talking to the gal who basically replaced my supervisor.  Nice gal.  I gave her a tip on how to keep the Epson working... it's temperamental and a brat, but it was my baby... and she's going to try that. I also chided her on using after market ink.  That stuff is horrible and can really f-up your printer.  But it wasn't my place to say that.  Not anymore.  Hell, it wasn't my place then.  :shrug:  I have a tendency to take over like the bull I am.  (Taurus, doncha know.)  I spent two years reining the bull in, and now that I don't work there anymore, the bull wants to run through that china shop.  LOL

The roadside blackberries are almost ready.  When I drove by them yesterday, they looked pretty red.  Once they turn black, I can have at them.  As long as no one else gets there first, and the birds leave them alone, and the deer don't find them.  Also, the elderberry plants are about done flowering and they're starting to grow berries.  I'm not sure if I can reach those over the barbed wire fence, but I'm going to try.

Speaking of roadside berries, I belong to a FB page about Missouri backroads and some gal on there was talking about picking roadside blackberries where she lives.  So, see?  I'm not the only weirdo who does that.  ROFL

I did the Wallyworld thing yesterday.  Man, it's hot here and I was all sweaty spaghetti by the time I got home.  But I got everything we needed and some things we didn't need.  My Wallyworld is carrying frozen yogurt, so I picked up one 'half-gallon' of vanilla and one of chocolate.  Yum.  All the yumminess of ice cream with less fat.

Speaking of half-gallons of ice cream... The damn things aren't actually half-gallons anymore and haven't been for a while now, but it still pisses me off when I think about it.  I think Blue Bell still does a full half-gallon, but who can afford that?  Last time I bought Blue Bell, it was like $8 for a half gallon.  Yeowch.  Don't get me started on all the other things that are smaller now but cost more.  Grrrr.

Anyway, it's creeping up on time to call Ma, so I'll leave you with that last thought.  What kinds of thoughts are you having today?

Thursday This n That

Still not dead.  

Yesterday, Hubs got the idea to cover the car ahead of the impending ice doom.  We used the boat cover (boat don't need it... it's in the garage with our Jeep).  While we were in the process of putting the cover on Cally Cavalier, a big blue RAV (Rural Assault Vehicle... looked like a little Humvee) pulled into the driveway.  She was looking for her little dog.  I recognized the car as one I'd seen parked in the newly-sold house here, so yay, met the new neighbor.  She seems nice.  Oh, and Hubs had to walk over to turn on the heater in the well house, so he stopped at her house to make sure she found her little dog.  She did.  Happy ending.  Yay.

Not sure yet if we got any ice yet, but we still have power, so yay.  We are as prepped for potential power outages as we can be at this point.  And Cally is about as wrapped against ice as we could make her.  Especially considering she's wearing a camouflage cover designed to be on a 15' boat.  I should take a pic of her in her new outfit.  (Yes, I talk about my car like it's a person.  I've had her longer than Hubs.)  

In the middle of the sleet-pounding we were taking yesterday, I looked out the window to see two deer standing in the woods, covered in white.  Poor babies.  Hubs went out to feed them.  He's such a nice guy.  He put out extra rations for the birds, too.  

Speaking of birds, we had a bunch of them hiding out on our covered porch during the worst of it.  Poor babies.  Winter is hard on animals, especially here where they aren't really used to it.  

Shit's happening in the world and I don't really want to talk about it.  Or think about it.  

I had to make a call to customer service for a nationally known company.  The gal I got barely spoke English.  Like I could understand maybe one in ten words out of her mouth.  I kept asking her to repeat stuff and she'd say it louder, but it was still mostly unintelligible.  It was like talking to a cricket on crack.  Chirp chirpchirpchirp CHIRP! CHIRPCHIRPCHIRPCHIRP.  I had called to ASK what would happen IF I closed my account - like timeframe and billing, etc.  Before I could figure out what she was saying, she closed my account.  I was all like 'NO NO NO', but it was already done.  Just as well, I guess.  I don't want to do business with a company like that anymore anyway.  The next call was to see if I could set up an account with a different company - now on super short notice so I don't have any break in services.  When the gal there answered the phone, I could've wept for joy because she spoke English.  She set me up and there's won't be any break.  Yay.  Would've sucked if she'd told me I had to wait a month.  

You know, I get why companies send their phone trees overseas.  But for pitysakes, find workers who can speak the language your customers use.  You wouldn't hire ME for a customer service line for Mexican customers, would you?  No habla.  (And no, the above cricket wasn't speaking Spanish.  It was just an example.)

I snagged a bucket of cheap ice cream the other day.  Neapolitan.  The last bucket the store had at a price I was willing to pay.  It's pretty tasty... but it has a weird after residue.  Like fat coating the roof of my mouth.  Sorry, that sounds gross.  But it's true.  I'll eat it all, of course, but I won't be buying that brand again.  Ever.

Okay, I should probably wander off to other parts of the web.  Have a great day.  And feel free to leave your this and that if you're so inclined.  

Sunday Update - Week 43

 Hi there!  I woke up at 3 a.m. this morning and I'm jacked up on coffee!  Yay!  And now it's time to wrap-up last week and look forward to next, so let's do this thing...

I didn't get any writing done, but that's okay because I'm not in a writing place right now.  What's not okay is that I didn't get much other writerly stuff done either.  Half a page of edit notes entered and a few hours of attempting to get things ready to load in Draft 2 Digital, at which point I got frustrated and went into the woods to make firewood.  I'll attempt the D2D thing again today.  And I'll talk more about that tomorrow on Outside the Box.

I did manage to get some reading done this week.  Yay!

In baking news, I made To Die For Coffee Cake - with the Butter Pecan cake mix as originally and most beautifully intended*.  Yummers.  (Recipe here.)

As for activity... Like I said above, I made firewood yesterday.  I also threw logs and dragged logs, all of which made up for 4 of my 5 active days this week.  The other day was devoted to unclogging the drain in our kitchen sink.  Yes, that counts.  Unfortunately, I gained two pounds.  I blame the cake.  And the ice cream.  Or rather the 'frozen dairy dessert' I bought at the Dollar General.  Weight: 181.6

I would've been more active, but the weather wasn't cooperating this week.  Splooshy splooshy rain for three days.  Yeah, I could've done something inside, but after working outside, riding the exercise bike is boring.

Oh, while we were out throwing logs, etc., we saw Chester Chipmunk running around in the woods gathering food for the coming winter.  So cute!  Yesterday, he actually came right up to where Hubs was working on reorganizing under the house and watched for a while before Hubs got too close and even then, Chester didn't run far away.  Such a good little critter.  I may have to take some birdseed down to where he's gathering and give him a nice treat.

One of the bigger bucks wandered through, lookin' for lurve.  I didn't get a good look at the rack, but he was built like a brick shithouse.  The girls aren't quite ready for him yet, though.  They can't be bothered with romance and prefer to just eat.  

In other news, I received an interesting letter via email.  I'm sure the sender thought they were being helpful.  However, unsolicited advice from strangers rarely goes off well.  (If you're here reading this blog and seeing my advice, it falls under the 'you asked for it' category.  I would never invade your space and send you an email with advice unless you asked for it.)  I spent some time thinking about how to reply - when I should've been sleeping - and ultimately deleted the email unanswered.  No good can come of engaging.  As for taking the advice, I can only say that at this point, to follow the advice I was given, I would need a big bag of moolah for new cover art and rebranding and a big marketing thing.  If you're a wealthy philanthropist, donations are always welcome via PayPal**.

Oh, crap, I just realized it's Halloween.  Happy Halloween!  I was supposed to do some marketing things this week to take advantage of the holiday, but I crapped out on that.  I also don't really celebrate since I don't have a kid anymore.  (I still have Owl, she's just not a kid.)  I thought about buying a pumpkin, but more for baking purposes than decor for the day.  If you're into Halloween and/or have kids and grandkids, have fun tonight!

And on that note, I'll let you go enjoy your day.  Time for me to try and hit the D2D thing again.  Maybe I'll have better luck and more patience.  ;o)

How was your last week?

*to borrow a phrase from The Philadelphia Story.

** totally kidding there... I probably still wouldn't make the changes, even if I won a cool million in the lottery.  But if you ARE a wealthy philanthropist, I wouldn't mind having a silent and anonymous benefactor of my arts.  ROFL

Sunday Update - Week 38 or Something

 :crawls out from under her rock:  Ugh.  Good morning   Last night was a pip, lemme tell ya.  Couldn't get to sleep, then after I did, the phone rang at 'oh, derp thirty' and while it was a butt-dial, it startled me enough so I couldn't get back to sleep.  This is why I still have a flip-phone*, folks.  No chance of accidentally dialing anyone in the middle of the night.  Of course, the middle of the night is when I'm sleeping, so no worries of that anyway.  

And I didn't set this post up before I went to bed, so here I am.  Under-caffeinated, groggy, and grumpy.

Despite giving myself a pep-talk and shouting nasty things at myself, I still didn't get off my ass.  I entered three pages worth of notes so far.  Today has to be better.  I'm under a deadline now.  A self-imposed deadline, sure, but it's a still a deadline.  Except I also have some spreadsheet stuff that ought to be sent back to the office before tomorrow morning. 

I didn't finish any books in time for yesterday's reading wrap-up, but I did finish one yesterday afternoon.  Go me?  

In baking news, I made Romanian apple cake.  Recipe below.  We're out of oatmeal cookies, so I should make those today.  We'll see.

Let's not talk about activity.  I did a hard target walk on Monday that overdid it for me and I spent the rest of the week cowering.  Weight: 178.4, which is down about a pound from last week.

In other news, I broke my own rule about no-Christmas stuff before Thanksgiving, and bought a tub of eggnog ice cream.  Don't judge me.  It was a necessary bright spot in an otherwise depressing Wallyworld excursion.  It's hard to stay cheery with a mask on.  Which, I'm beginning to think, is their point.  Speaking of masks, they're littered all over the Wallyworld parking lot now.  People are pigs.

The migration is starting to bring us new birds.  Something different was singing his little brains out the other day.  Not sure what he was, but I love seeing and hearing new birds.  Haven't seen an eagle yet, but they'll be here shortly.

The fawns have no spots anymore.  And the bucks have lost their velvet.  The does are getting jumpy.  Soon, the rut will begin and start the cycle of life all over again.

Okay, that's enough out of me this morning.  What's up with you?  :wanders off to slug down more coffee:

*Well, part of the reason. The rest of the reason is if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  My flip-phone ain't broke, so why buy a new one?

Recipe:

Romanian Apple Cake

5 large (9 small) apples
3 eggs
1 ½ cups sugar
¾ cup vegetable oil
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 T vanilla
2 cups flour

Peel, core, and cut apples into large chunks (about 1”).  Preheat oven to 350F.  Grease 9x13” cake pan.  Beat together eggs and sugar until frothy.  Blend in oil, baking soda, vanilla, and cinnamon.  By quarters, gently stir in flour until just combined.  Fold in apple chunks.  Pour batter into prepared pan.  Bake for 50-55 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.  Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or eat plain later.

Homemade Ice Cream w/o a Churn

The homemade ice cream worked out.  No churn needed.  I thought it was good but very rich.  Owl thought it was good but too sweet.  Hubs doesn't eat much ice cream, so he hasn't tried it.  Anyway, if you want to try it, here's the recipe:

1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup dark chocolate syrup
2 cups heavy whipping cream

Blend together condensed milk and syrup in a large bowl.  In a separate medium to large bowl, whip cream on high until it forms stiff peaks.  Fold whipped cream into milk mixture.  Pour into sealable container.  Freeze overnight or until ice cream is firm.  Scoop and serve. 

Owl pointed out that I might have whipped the cream a smidge too long, so watch out for that.  She also suggested I try using cocoa powder next time to cut the sweetness and making up the loss of liquid by adding a 1/4 cup of unwhipped whipping cream to the condensed milk.  :shrug:  Your mileage may vary.

Also, apparently, you're supposed to whip cream in a cold bowl, preferably metal.  I don't have any metal mixing bowls.  I'll try chilling my plastic bowl next time.  If there is a next time.  I still prefer store bought ice cream.  But this is a good substitute if you're out of IC, have the ingredients handy, and don't mind whipping cream. (Not by hand.  Good lord, that would be a huge pain.  Use a mixer.)

Next time, I think I'll try just making vanilla and see how that works out.

Oh, and I used a gallon plastic ice cream container.  We wash them out and use them for all sorts of stuff, and it's perfect for this.  It was less than half full, but better that than overfull.  Blue Bunny sells their half-gallons in plastic containers, so those would work, too.

Good luck!

Sunday Update - Week 28

Nearly forgot it was Sunday again.  Everything blurs together lately.

I wrote about a thousand words last week.  I told a friend that I had the words but not the gumption.  Turns out I don't have either.  When I sat down to write, I got the thou out and it felt shitty.  I know, I know, you can fix shitty, but it's hard to keep writing when you know what's coming out is shitty.

No reading, marketing, or editing.  Blerg.

The other day, Hubs and I took apart the pipes under the kitchen sink and cleaned them out.  The sink was backing up, so it was a must-do.  Talk about gross.  And there was one bend that had something I can only describe as a bezoar in it.  When it hit the bathtub, it clunked.  (We put the pipes in a bucket and scrubbed them out in the bathtub for ease of post-cleaning cleaning.)  No clue what the hell that was.  And it's not like we've never cleaned these pipes, so it was our mess and not the previous owners'.

Yesterday, I made ice cream using a recipe Silver James posted on her blog a while back.  As of bedtime, it wasn't quite hard enough to eat yet - more like a firm mousse than ice cream - but I have hopes for today.  (My freezer* has this thing it does where it freezes most things solid, but other things - like those liquid freezer pops - not.)  If it works, I'll drop my tweaked recipe here.  Hers was coffee ice cream, I made chocolate.  

Other than that, I have been thoroughly unmotivated for a couple weeks now.  It's hotter than Blue Billy blazes which makes exercise, fishing, and baking unpleasant.  I'm disheartened by the world which makes me want to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt in over myself.  Stuffs.  As such, I've been spending too much time playing free poker.  At least there I have the illusion of productivity and have almost $800K in chips**.  (Over a million in the play-money slots.  Woohoo.)  Friday I took 20K in chips and built it to over 200K.  Yay.  Would that it were real money. 

Here's hoping the next week goes better.  How did your week go?

* My freezer and fridge are on the same control.  If I turn it up (which is actually down), things in the fridge start to freeze, too.  Poorly engineered.  Gah.  On the upside, all the meats are solid as a rock, so no worries about food poisoning.

** All without buying chips, which you can do at this site.  I took the amounts they gave me and built them up to where I am now.  

Thursday This n That

As soon as I sat down to write this all the ideas I had for this post scurried back into the shadows of my mind.  That's pretty much how writing fiction feels right now.

I'm out of ice cream again.  Hubs was all like 'didn't you just buy ice cream?' and I was all like 'on the 18th'.  Two people - Owl and I - eating ice cream every day tends to make the ice cream disappear quicker.  Blerg.

Amazon finally shipped my order.  There are only two things in it - a bottle of glucosamine pills and a printer cartridge.  Luckily, we aren't out of ink and I've been rationing my pills.  I forgot to buy ink when I was at Wallyworld and they were out of the glucosamine.  Why they were out of those escapes me.  It's not like it combats the 'rona.  Sheesh.

I woke up this morning to a world gone madder. 

I really need to go fishing.  Unfortunately, the lake levels are so high, there's really only one place I can fish right now - the driveway to the parking lot of my normal fishing spot.  The parking lot is now full. 

That's it when the lake is at 930 ft above sea level.  In case you missed it, here's what it looked like on the 21st when it was 925ft.

They're supposed to have started dumping water out of the dams, but we're also supposed to get more sky water, so I don't expect to see much of a change any time soon.

I could probably still fish.  The problem comes when other people are trying to put their boats in there and those that have put in will have taken all the remaining parking spots along the road.  =o(

I could also maybe fish here...

I've fished that road before, there's just no place to park.  Only one person lives along the non-floody part on the east side, and I know her, so I'm sure she wouldn't mind me parking in the road, but parking in the road makes me nervous.

We'll see.

Anyway, that's all I can think to talk about today.  Got anything on your this-n-that today?

Scatterbrained Again

I'm still pretty scatterbrained again.  It's an editing / writing thing with me.  The more my brain is fixated on writing or editing, the less I'm able to focus my efforts into a longer thought stream about non-writing related things.

Another thing that happens when I've been editing is the urge to edit everything.  Stuff I'm writing, stuff I'm reading, stuff I'm saying, stuff other people are writing or saying (which includes newspapers, ads, tv shows, news, and commercials) - nothing can escape my editbrain.  Luckily most of the corrections I make stay in my head.  And otherwise, Hubs is the only one to hear it and he's used to it.  The cat don't care.

Speaking of the cat, we've settled into a nice 5-6 hour litterbox schedule now.  As long as I wake up around 2-3am and take her to the litterbox, life is good.  And we haven't had any accidents since I started this. 

We heard an owl last night.  It was a great-horned.  They're so cool.

I broke my vow yesterday and bought ice cream.  And I ate a bowl as soon as I got home.  Almost made it two months without ice cream.  Actually today would've been two months.  I picked up something called Candybar Crunch- which I've had before.  It's not as good as I remembered.  I should've just gone with chocolate or vanilla, but if I was going to break my streak, it was going to be with something special.  Oh well. 

Last night, I wrote almost 2900 words.  I just sat down and started writing, without thinking about where it was going or what I was going to do.  Woo, getting all those words out was a relief and I really like where I headed.  Whether any of it makes sense in the whole scheme of the story will be decided in edits.

Why do I keep thinking it's Wednesday???  Argh.

How's your brain these days?  Scattered?  Walking the straight and narrow?  Gone?  Talk to me, people.  Give me the skinny.

Sunday Update - Week 3

Hello and welcome to the end of week 3.  I hope your year is going well so far.

After hitting the ground running at the beginning of the month, I hit a wall running.  Splat.  So, this week, I only got about 3500 new words written on Cinder Ugly and about 25 pages edited in Ugly and the Beast.  But slow progress is better than no progress.

I did some marketing because Accidental Death and Natural Causes are both on sale.  A lot of work for minimal sales.  But minimal sales are better than no sales.  Anyway, this Kindle Countdown Deal lasts through Tuesday night.  Project Hermes goes on sale in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

In reading news, I spent most of the week on a SF paperback.  It was like 580+ pages long.  Good book.  Not what I expected from a third book in this series, since it really didn't tie into the first two too much until like the last quarter, while the second book tied directly into the first.  :shrug:  And it read more like a dystopian than a SF - deep philosophical stuffs going on in there.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, though.  I didn't review it.  Not sure if I can do it justice.

Despite my 'do it anyway' resolve for the year, I didn't do much in activity this week.  I finally finished washing the light fixture globes, which was a necessity.  I vacuumed a bit in prep for washing floors and then I didn't wash the floors.  Like I said above, I hit a wall.  I did lose like a half a pound, though.  181.2.  And I got on the exercise bike for the first time in like a year.  Ten minutes of that and then nada.  The problem with the exercise bike is that it's uncomfortable on my aberrant bone growths.  I expect if I do it more, the ABGs will get used to it.

Still no ice cream.  I'm slowly getting to the point where I don't want it.  I even went to Wallyworld and didn't go into that aisle.  We'll see what happens once the temps rise.  Typically, I eat less ice cream in the winter anyway, so there's the real test.

Yesterday, I rearranged the fridge shelves.  Woohoo.  We'll see how it works for us and if it's a pain, then I'll move the shelves back.  Right now, though, it just seems to make more sense to put the heavy beverages on the bottom shelf for more stability and the leftovers on the top shelf where there's light enough to see what the hell is in the containers.  Why I never thought of this before escapes me.  I guess I've just been putting the milk and juice on the top shelf all my life.  Habit - it's a thing, man.

Okay, that's about enough out of me.  I probably should get myself back in gear.  It's a new day and a new week.  Time to kick the old attitude in the pants and jump start the new attitude again. 

How was your week?

Thursday This n That

The bird of the day is the belted kingfisher.  I love these birds.  They keep me company at the lake and make me laugh with their funny little calls and their diving for fish.

So, FB was down for most of the day yesterday, which was weird.  I immediately thought of all the people who had planned marketing bursts for yesterday and I thanked my lucky stars that my sale was over. 

I'm eternally grateful the general populace can't see the sticky notes on my desk.  There's one there now to remind me of a plot point I want to fix later in UatB.  If anyone else read it without context, I'd probably be put in a loony-bin. 

Where I lived in CO got hammered with snow yesterday.  I admit I giggled.  There might be a half-dozen people I knew left there that I feel bad for.  The rest of the people I knew?  It's karma. 

Yes, I am petty and spiteful.  And I hold grudges.  It's not keeping me up at night or anything, but I don't forget or forgive being wronged.  (Okay, maybe sometimes it keeps me up at night.  Never can tell what the brain will focus on when I'm trying to fall asleep.)

I'm out of vanilla ice cream, but I still have brownies left.  Gah.  Speaking of ice cream, Wallyworld has something called Salted Caramel Chocolate Crunch that is the bomb.  Chocolate caramel ice cream with a caramel ribbon and crunchy chocolate-covered honey bits.  OMG.

The cardinals know Spring is coming.  We're hearing the males singing their songs of love.  The mourning doves are also cooing for a mate.  I can't wait until it's warm enough to hear the frogs again.  Spring Peepers are the best harbingers of Spring.

I can't wait until we start seeing the deer getting fat with babies.  Should be in the next few weeks.  Yay.

It's super windy here this morning.  Bleh.

Okay, that's it for me.  What are your this n thats today?