Confused? He was driving back tonight from California, after driving there yesterday to drop off grapes.  He thought he’d make it back by 12:30ish tonight but also thought he might stop and sleep instead. So, I’m waiting up to see if he calls to tell me he’s pulled over for the night.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, I’ve completed a short story, made a peach and apple cobbler, and made vanilla ice cream.  I believe the first two are successful. The third is a little… crunchy.  If I think of it as snow cream then it’s fine.  Note: lowfat milk doesn’t cut it for icecream.

On the other hand, the cobbler really wanted it and… this will tell you a lot about me. I was too lazy to walk back to the store to buy ice cream.  It’s okay. I see the crazy there.

Did I mention I finished a short story?

Edited to add: 12:45. He is home safely. Night all!

But she wasn’t eating. So they gave her an appetite stimulant and subcutaneous fluids.  Back at home, Maggie kept looking at the food as if she wanted to eat it but was too nauseated to consider doing so. And then, finally, she nibbled.

The problem was that she wanted to be near me and followed me from room to room.  I wanted her to hang out with the food. So I hauled my computer and a chair into the kitchen and camped out there for most of the day.  She ate a little.

The situation is that if she goes the weekend without eating her kidneys will likely begin to shut down.  There are also likely larger issues going on, but at this point the vet says that everything, except irritable bowel syndrome, is untreatable. So we’re treating it as if it’s IBS and hoping for the best.

Maggie is alert and walking without pain, if a little unsteadily.  Really, aside from the loss of appetite there is nothing apparent wrong with her.  I wish I could speak cat so she and I could talk about what was going on.

Edited to add on Friday: She has begun nibbling and had some tuna and kibble today.  Many thanks for the healing vibes.

Tasty, yes. However, it prompted me to post to twitter, “I am hoping that wrapping the homemade truffles in gold foil will keep them from looking quite so much like turds.”

Why am I writing about it now? Because I need to make another series of small gifts and am strongly considering the truffles. My only problem is that I don’t know where to go for the gold foil in NYC.

Any suggestions?

The rest of the day seemed to consist of meeting very cool people for food or drinks, interspersed with a nap. I didn’t manage to make it to any panels at all which is a shame because Wiscon has really good ones. I’m going to try to remedy that today. Speaking of which, I should head out and hit the con.

I had dinner with Doselle Young and Shana Cohen tonight at a very nice restaurant. It’s so nice to go out with other foodies.  I’m now ensconced in a truly gorgeous hotel room and about to collapse in bed. After I finish two or three more things…

I have to say that seeing a vegetable garden go in at the White House makes me really happy.

via The White House – Blog Post – Spring Gardening.

There were two notable exceptions. Liz Gorinsky made a homemade version of Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese that was a god send in the midst of all that sugar. It vanished very quickly. My favorite visual memory of the evening came after everyone had left and Rob picked the giant serving spoon, scraping the edges of the tin to get out the last of the mac and cheese. The spoon was so oversized that he totally looked like a small child.

The other exception was one of my favorites, shrimp cocktail.  Apparently, when I was very little, I loved it. Mom tells this story about putting away my sweater after some part and discovering, in the pockets, handfuls of shrimp. Upon questioning, I explained that I was saving them for later. Fortunately, I didn’t feel the need to recreate that entire dish: Day Old Shrimp with Finely Shredded Cotton Fibers.

Other favorite foods included Katie Menick’s homemade girlscout cookie Samoas, Fabulous Girl’s Mother’s Lemon Poundcake, Jennifer Jackson’s grandmother’s coffee toffee bars. There were flapjacks, Capri-suns, Peanut Butter and Jelly Cupcakes. (My idea, via Martha Stewart, to combine two childhood favorites in one) Graham Crackers and White frosting, and… somewhere in there a sugar coma set in.

We all trouped out to a matinee of Coraline, which was really enjoyable although there were aspects of the book that I seriously missed.

I’ve now stayed up waaaaay too late, finishing the final touches on Issue 10 of Shimmer. I’m going to print it out in the morning and barring any surprises, we’ll send it to the printer on Monday.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a story that I’d like to start tomorrow.

Around mid-day I realized that we basically had apples and some salsa in the house. Maybe a little more than that, but still, it was not presenting any easy menu options so I ventured out to the store. To my surprise, the stores were a) open and b) no more crowded than usual.

For dinner we had lemon rice, seared ahi tuna with black pepper and sesame seeds, and sauteed mixed winter greens with a tea broth. Afterwards we watched Groundhog Day, which Rob had never seen.

There are many things in the world to be thankful for and today, I’m thankful for a chance to be utterly lazy with my husband.

If you didn’t have to be anywhere at all, how would you spend the day?

Spotted at Matthew Jarpe, who clearly understands barbecue.

See those cookies that look like they are completely burned? That’s how much was left on the pan after I chiseled the rest away. I don’t use the word chisel, hyperbolically.

Nice, huh?

6 cups water
1 cup Thai tea
3/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons cream
6 tablespoons condensed milk

In a kettle, bring the water to a boil. Place the tea in a teapot or glass container. Pour the water over the tea and let steep until bright orange in color, 3 to 5 minutes. Strain into a clean container, such as a pitcher (or, if in tea bags, remove the bags). Add sugar and stir to dissolve. Let cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Fill 6 tall glasses with crushed ice and add tea to 3/4 full. Add 1 tablespoon cream and 1 tablespoon condensed milk to each glass.

Indeed. My seatmate was Ron Serdiuk from Pulp Fiction Press out of Australia. We knew so many people in common that it was almost comic that we hadn’t met before. The flight seemed almost too short, so we shared a cab into the city.

I must say, I was not expecting the flight home to be one of the highlights of the trip, but it was.

The next highlight happened at home. My beloved husband had picked up season three of Battlestar Galactica. And Chinese food. Mmm…

In the production of Rainbow Kiss, a Battenberg Cake figures prominently however it’s never eaten. Now, the battenberg is very specific in look, with a checkerboard of pink and white visible in every slice. While it’s very common in the UK, it’s something of a specialty item here, so I asked the director if it would be all right to have a fake one rather than a perishable one. Thank heavens he’s quite reasonable and saw the sense in that.

Appropriately, the Battenberg is a sponge cake so. I got two shop sponges and cut them into the pieces for the checkerboard. I dyed two of them pink, using food coloring, and left two the color of the sponge.

Real Battenberg is held together with apricot jam. I used a mix of vinyl wallpaper paste and acrylic paint to get that gelatinous orange quality.

As the sponges absorbed moisture from the paste, they swelled. To keep them from separating, I used a good old fashioned c-clamp. Later, when I needed to apply equal pressure over the whole thing, I wrapped the cake in masking tape, which I left in place for the next phase.

Icing the cake. Mm… looks yummy, right? If that were real, it’d be covered in marzipan. As it is, it’s a lovely confection of gloss gel medium, modeling paste and a touch of raw sienna for that almond tint. The final product took forever to dry, even with a fan on it.

See, the exterior of the icing dried quickly, but it sealed the surface, so the rest of the moisture wicked inside the sponge and could only evaporate out the ends. When it finally set, I used an electric carving knife to cut slices.

Apparently I made a monster Battenberg. The real ones are about half the size of mine. At least, the commercially available ones are. One of the actresses reassured me that homemade or bakery ones are big like mine. Whew. It’s hard to tell from online photos how large they are, you know? I was estimating based on the recipes and how thick American cakes are. I should have known better, since we tend to supersize things.

An excerpt:

French vineyard owners are returning to a slower pace of life by starting to export their wine by sailing boat – a method last used in the 1800s – to reduce their carbon footprint.

Later this month 60,000 bottles from Languedoc will be shipped to Ireland in a 19th-century barque, saving 18,375lb of carbon. Further voyages to Bristol, Manchester and even Canada are planned soon afterwards.

The three-mast barque Belem, which was launched in 1896, the last French merchant sailing vessel to be built, will sail into Dublin following a voyage from Bordeaux that should last about four days. The wines will be delivered to Bordeaux by barge using the Canal du Midi and Canal du Garonne, which run across southern France from Sète in the east, via Béziers in Languedoc. Each bottle will be labelled: ‘Carried by sailing ship, a better deal for the planet.’ Although the whole process will end up taking up to a week longer than a flight, it is estimated it will save 4.9oz of carbon per bottle.

Does anyone else feel a story possibility sitting here?

He stayed with us for two nights and took us out to dinner tonight at Jean-Georges. I think we all agreed that the food was well-crafted, but not inspiring. By that I mean that everything was exquisitely cooked, but that the recipes were uneven. We had a tuna tartare that was probably divine, if it weren’t over-sauced with Thai Ginger. Even so, it was a delightful meal. We had two wines that were exquisite — I’ll get the names from Rob tomorrow.

If that craving for chocolate sometimes feels like it is coming from deep in your gut, that’s because maybe it is.

A small study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate’s allure.

Now if I can just convince them to carry the pear flavor.

I was, to be honest, anticipating some fireworks. When I got Marlowe as a kitten, Maggie hated him so much that if I petted Marlowe and then tried to touch her without washing my hands, she would hiss at me. I’m not making that up. She tolerates him now, more so after the cross-country drive than before.

And Marlowe has never seen another cat, except ones outside the window. His only other experience with other animals have been with dogs that we’ve dogsat. (Boy, that word looks wrong.) Oh, and the mice. Anyway, I had no idea how he would react.

Zoe came right out of her carrier and went up to Marlowe to sniff his nose. He was totally freaked. He had no idea what to do. He only knows this one other cat who beat him up as a kitten–in fact, it’s only in the last year or two that he’s realized that he’s bigger than she is and that she’s old. So, despite the fact that he looks like a giant hulk next to Zoe (also a black cat) he was afraid of her.

Maggie stretched, walked up to Zoe. They sniffed. Then Maggie went to take a nap on the futon. She was so not interested. I think she was just pleased that I hadn’t brought home another dog.

We spent most of dinner watching the cats watch each other. The best moment came after dinner. I wanted to show Jenny and Chris the thing that Marlowe does with the basket. I didn’t think he’d do it, because there was so much strangeness. Man, he saw the basket and beelined across the room to sink his face into it. He immediately sank into his “I’m invisible” posture and seemed so much more at ease.

Zoe. Zoe clearly thought he was insane.

She crept out from under the bookcase where she had been hiding and stretched out to sniff the basket. Marlowe made one “meep” and she levitated backwards, kindof like, “My god! There really is a cat in that thing!”

After that everyone settled into a good routine of ignoring each other. I saw her this morning when I put her food down, but she’s hiding now. I think she’s in my closet, but I’m not going to fish her out. Jenny and Chris come back to pick her up tonight.

After some thought, I decided to go all out and serve the meal in courses, so I could really test our set-up. The kitchen cart, by the way, is worth all thirty blocks in the rain. It makes the space so much more workable. Up to this point, I’d been frustrated because the prep area is at the other end of the kitchen from the stove with the refrigerator between, so I couldn’t keep an eye on anything cooking. This is much better.

We started with negronis, which I think Rob wanted to make, in part, because he will be around copious amounts of wine at IPNC this weekend. I had some good olives and two local cheeses, blue and cave-aged cheddar. Sam has a list of food allergies which is fairly impressive and totally fuels my desire to have a challenge when cooking. No gluten, tomato, potato, peppers or eggplant. It’s normally fine but I could not find any gluten free bread. It was very aggravating. I found a source today, of course.

The rest of the menu:

The only real failure was the garlic spears. I love these sauteed in olive oil; they remind me of garlic flavored asparagus. Wonderful. However, these were spectacularly woody. I mean. Really. Spectacular. We could not cut them with a knife. Chewing was possible, but only with heroic efforts. The flavor was still good, but only at a great cost.

We still have work do on the apartment. Jodi and Sam were very gracious about the fact that our futon is still on the floor. (The frame comes next week) For all that, the evening felt very comfortable. It also soothes me considerably to be able to entertain. It’s part of my nesting impulse. I enjoy cooking. I like having people over.

I spent so long on tour, that I think I don’t really believe a place is mine unless I can invite people over. For the past several months, while things were in boxes, I stopped feeling like the house in Portland was mine. It became a tour location. Know what I mean? So I now finally feel like I live here.

Of course, in a complete paradox, I now also feel homesick because Rob got on plane to go back to Portland for ten days. le sigh.

Here’s the last of the dining room photos, just because.

We started by having brunch with fab girl, her friend Leslie, Jodi and Jed at Cafe Deville. It’s a nice big open space with good food, but the service was questionable. We kept having to send water glasses away because they had floaters in them. Ugh.

After that, Rob and I spent a couple of hours tromping around to various paper and art supply stores looking for the paperwood I want for my laptop’s space bar. No luck. I finally picked up a piece of thin birch ply for model airplanes. I’ve found paperwood online, but there keep being minimum orders and, you know, I want to test it first. It’s very frustrating. If you know a store that carries it, do let me know.

Giving up on that, we headed to Home Depot to pick up paint for the living room and dining room. While I’m all for shopping locally, I just can’t plunk down $45 on a gallon of paint. Can’t. And that’s what the paint costs in my neighborhood.

In between painting, I wrestled with a couple of different computer programs trying to crank out an ad for Shimmer, because my software is still in the boxes coming from Iceland. All the trial versions of other software have expired, leaving me with nothing very useful. Again. Frustrating. So I went back and forth between that and the walls, which are also frustrating because they are just a wee bit uneven. It’s impossible to get a clean edge, even with tape, at any point. I do it better freehanding, really.

I’m heading off to shower and bed now. I’ve got a job interview for a temp position as a receptionist tomorrow. While I’m here to do puppetry, it usually takes a year or two to establish oneself in a new community. Gotta keep food on the table and paint on the walls while that’s happening, eh?

Much to our surprise, Stefan was in town from LA for the night. We had no idea he was coming. I guess he got in around 7:00 pm, has a gig today, and is flying back home tonight. Crazy life of actors. It was so good to see him. We trotted out the Icelandic for about three sentences and then spent the rest of the evening in English. Which is good because I have so not been practicing.

But I think we all really enjoyed reminiscing about Iceland itself and didn’t talk about the show at all. Certainly, Stefan had wonderful, wonderful stories to tell about growing up as the son of a whaler. Fascinating stuff. I miss being there.

The meal itself was good, but not exceptional. Solid, well-conceived food. sigh… I sound like such a food snob. It was a lovely evening. Hopefully the first of many.

(By the way, for those newcomers to my site, I worked on this show, but try to avoid using the name to make it harder for fans to search for it. The producers of the show let me blog while I was working there with the understanding that I would keep my posts generic and specific to the work that I was doing. There’s also the fact that one of my co-workers, the youngest daughter referred to earlier, is a minor and some of her fans can be a little creepy.)

But, there are some things in the apartment that have come together in ways that really please me. For instance, we had all of these wooden wine crates that we brought the china out in. What to do with them? Or how about the baskets that only really get used when I have company? Behold! They are in the kitchen.

Shelving in process

Yesterday, Rob and I headed out to the Union Square Farmers’ market to pick up produce and bread. Trader Joe’s has opened up a branch just a couple of blocks from the farmers’ market so we picked up some staples. Interestingly, they don’t have the same stock as the one in Portland, so we had to skip some favorites.

In the evening, I went to the closest organic store here and discovered that yes, they do have spices in bulk. Hurrah! I’d also taken my granola jar so I could stock up. I explained what I wanted to do.

“You have to weigh it first,” he said.

Pointing to the weight written on the jar, I said, “I already have the tare, but can double-check.” Why not, I figured, after all I could be trying to pull one over on him. So I put it on the scale, which read 2.00, just like I had written on the jar. So I get a couple of scoops of the granola I want to try, look at the other items and then come back to check out.

He plunked the jar on the scale and it read 2.67. “That’ll be $10.63.”

“Um…” I looked at the half-empty jar. “Really? I think you’ve got the weight of the jar in there too.”

“Huh. How much did the jar weigh?” He scowled at me. “Did you weigh this?”

I was one of two customers in the store. The other was a tall, cadaverous man with a beard who arrived after I weighed it. I smiled and nodded anyway. “Yes. It was two point oh.” Again, I point to the weight written helpfully on the jar.

“Grab a bag and put the granola in that. So I can weigh it.”

“What?”

“A bag. Get a bag. From there. Put the granola in it so I can get the right weight. I don’t know how much the jar weighs.”

“But I don’t want a bag. If I’d wanted a plastic bag, I wouldn’t have lugged a two-pound jar with me to the store. We know the jar weighs two pounds, so that means I have .67 pounds of granola.”

The cadaverous man chimed in. “You can put the tare in the scale to get the right price. I used to do this all the time at a food co-op out west.”

I smiled gratefully at him. “Thanks. That’s what we did back in Portland. I’ve just moved.”

He nodded as if he knew exactly what I was going through. The guy behind the counter punched some buttons and finally said, “$2.67 cents.”

We all agreed that sounded right, so I gave the counter guy the money and said, “So what do I need to do next time I come in? Because I’m going to bring my own containers again.”

As if he was my new best friend he said, “I’ll figure it out. Don’t you worry. Next time, I’ll know how to use the scale.”

Oh good.

Honestly though, if I’d found another place with spices in bulk or if this weren’t the closest organic store…

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In my story, “The Bride Replete,” I have an alien race which uses some of the members as repletes to store large quantities of food in their crops (a sort of sac for, well, food-storage). I had thought of using sodium bicarbonate and water to create a constant pressure in a replete’s crop during the process of stretching them. Would this work? They do have a sphincter they can close and open voluntarily. Is there something better?

Many thanks!

Edited to add: This is a totally alien planet with no human interactions, so brand name things are right out. The technology is roughly equivalent to mid-1800s England, though there’s room to play, since it’s another planet.

Edited further to add: This is an artificial process to speed up the way it would work naturally. It’s someone using science to do what would naturally happen by just eating more food everyday. This is a way to prep a new replete for when the harvest season begins.

While I seriously doubt that we will complete all of the reports before we all get bored with the idea, here is report number 1 written on the Oliver Visible Writer No. 3. It does not have a standard keyboard, so my degree of typos is a bit high.

Speaking of strange and corncobs, we discovered today that Marlowe likes corncobs–not corn, mind you, but corncobs. When I’d finished my lunch, I held the corncob out to Marlowe. He’s often strange and has a tendency to like vegetables. He spent the next, oh, fifteen minutes licking the corncob. It was cute and a little disturbing.

Anyway, we were on the road by six o’clock and made reasonably good time. I must say, West Virginia’s interstate was the smoothest we’ve been on; it’s too bad that we were only in the state for twenty-five miles. When we hit Pennsylvania, traffic stopped. We’re on the turnpike now, but I’m unclear on what the toll fees are being spent on.

We passed a number of towns or landmarks with names that just wouldn’t fly in a book. Paxtonia? Linglestown? Mad River? Triadelphia? Boro of Alpha? Please… Oh, and two Bethlehems. What’s up with that?

I spent quite a while on the phone today, changing our arrival plans around. Instead of going into Katonah tonight, we went to Brooklyn to drop Jodi’s stuff off. We arrived around 8:30. My brother, Steve, just arrived after the ball game he attended. Indian food is on the way. Whew.

Tomorrow is load-in day. Wish us luck.

For those of you who are thinking, “Wait–isn’t Mary a vegetarian?” the answer is yes and no. I tend to be, but I am much more interested in good and interesting food than I am in being a stickler for no meat. So, knowing that Brad was a foodie, I was only too happy to eat whatever he wanted to make. Dinner was very, very good. My advice is to figure out a way to get him to cook for you.

Also, and I don’t usually say such things, his wife Joanne is distractingly beautiful. Also sweet and funny. The entire visit was quite wonderful.

We left about 8:00 this morning. In Indiana, we crossed over “Nameless Creek.” (I would have taken a photo, but the batteries are dead. Tomorrow, I’ll try to resume the photography of our trip.) We made good time to Ohio, except for Detroit and Chicago which had major road construction. I don’t mind being in the truck for days, but I am getting really tired of being jostled. There’s something about the way the truck, our belongings and the road interact that periodically causes us to get shaken back and forth so that our heads bounce against the seat backs. This is the first road trip where I haven’t wanted to read, even though I brought plenty of books.

To put this in perspective, we used to drive between Raleigh and Chattanooga a couple of times a year when I was growing up. I would read for the whole trip, even in the Nandahala Gorge. I’ve never had motion sickness issues. But in this vehicle, the thought of picking up a book is really not appealing.

However, I have gotten a fair bit of writing done.

We arrived safely at the Scalzi compound and were treated to another wonderful meal. You know how Scalzi is always going on about how fabulous his wife Krissy is? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. He’s not exaggerating in any respect. Corn on the cob, grilled portabello mushrooms, pasta salad… mmm. After dinner we watched fireflies on the lawn.

I’ll tell you, after spending the day selling off our possessions, going to a housewarming in such a cute house was exactly what I needed to give me hope that our move will be over someday.

The only drawback that I can see is that I have stayed up too late again. But it was fun.

Aimee came up so I could take her to the yarn store on Alberta today. Everytime I’m in a yarn store I want to knit something and then when I try knitting I get bored out of my mind. I know other people love it, but it just makes me restless.

Rob and I went out to dinner tonight at Bernie’s Southern Bistro. We got a gift certificate from my realtor for recommending him to Christina. I’d gone to Bernie’s once before and been underwhelmed. Alas, tonight my experience was repeated. Part of it, of course, is that I grew up with really good Southern food–allow me to introduce you to my mother and you will understand why I am hard to impress–but the rest of it was just that it wasn’t all that well balanced. Rob was not impressed either. It’s not bad, mind you, just not what the ambiance wants you to think it will be. Still it was nice to get out of the house.

And now, I return to packing and labeling things for the yard sale. I am looking forward to the road trip. It’ll be so peaceful with the open road, Rob, and two cats–wait.

I spent the morning hanging out with Christina and in the evening, Rob and I went to the store to pick up some wet cat food to tempt Maggie. Lo! She ate. Thank heavens. Marlowe is, of course, wondering why he doesn’t get the same treats she does. Silly kitty. I offered to wrap him in a towel and shove butter down his throat, but he doesn’t seem interested.

The vet nodded, “If she’s not eating; then you may need to bring her back in.”

“I don’t think she’s getting sicker; I think she’s depressed.”

Across the waiting room a black cat yowled as if someone were killing him right there. His owner tried to reassure him, but the cat didn’t speak English. Neither does Maggie, so I can’t tell her what the vet said–that if she doesn’t finish the antibiotics, she could develop a super-resistant strain of stomach bug.

“I know.” I nodded. Years ago, I’d wanted to be a vet; I hated being the neurotic pet owner now. “It’s just that I feel like I’m making things worse.”

“Well, if the half-tablets are too large, try cutting them into quarters and see if she’ll take it with some soft food.”

I blinked. “Half-tablets? We’ve been giving her whole tablets.”

Looking down at her chart, the vet said, “Half tablet every twelve hours. Fortunately it’s a very mild medicine, so it’s not dangerous.”

It still made me feel ill. I mean, misreading medication like that could have been fatal. “So, instead of having three more days, I have six more days?”

“Right. But if we can get at least seven days of antibiotics and if the symptoms have stopped, then it’s probably safe to stop the pills. It’s better to finish the round, but if it’s making her miserable you can stop after seven days.”

I thanked her and biked home with my handy syringe. Rob was waiting for me, so we could do her morning pilling. I told him what the vet said and then I grabbed the bottle of pills.

The label said, “One pill every twelve hours.”

One. Not half. I called the vet’s office, related my story and learned that the label was wrong. So, on the one hand, there’s a measure of relief, because I didn’t misread the instructions. On the other hand, I’m ticked. I mean, hello? It’s lucky that it was a “mild” medication because I could have hurt my cat.

The half-pill is, surprise, easier to get down Maggie’s throat. The routine goes like this. I butter the pill and then we stick it in the freezer (thanks, Christina), which helps keep the coating from melting. I grab Maggie and swaddle her in a towel, sitting on the kitchen floor. Holding her on her back, I brace her while Rob pries her mouth open and shoves the pill back as far as he can. She cries. He squirts water down her throat, which forces her to swallow. It does seem to help.

Both pilling sessions went well today. But–but we have to do it for twice as long as we thought we did. Or…or we quit after seven days. And poor Maggie has no idea why we decided to start torturing her.

Poor kitty.

I swung by Trader Joe’s on the way over to visit, because the man is clearly an amateur at touring and needed decent tour snack food. I also gave him a couple of packets of EmergenC to hopefully help him through the next week.

Afterward his reading a group of writers went to the Market St. McMenamins. I even enticed Rob down there and my neo-luddite husband got into a very interesting discussion about blogs with Scalzi, Jay Lake and David Goldman. David Levine and Kate ducked out early so they missed out on that fun. Rob doesn’t get the concept of blogging. He wanted to know what the difference between a blog and photocopying a page of his journal and sticking it to the wall of a bus terminal every day.

That might be an interesting experiment actually, an analog blog as it were. I said that in many ways blogs were like the op-ed columns in the newspaper, and Jay added that comments were sort of like letters to the editor. Scalzi pointed out that this sort of dialogue could really be seen all the way back to the pamphleteers running around in the 1700s century. Until he brought that up, I’d totally forgotten about what were essentially flame wars between authors who would trash each other’s work and then publish rebuttal after rebuttal. (I would give you sources, but I read it in paper and my books are in boxes.)

I got about 900 words done with lots and lots of brackets. What’s the name of the neighboring planet? I dunno, haven’t thought about it yet, so I called it [planet]. Now I’m going through and doing a find-replace to turn it into Dahaida.

A friend of mine, Mr. Fisher, turned me on to a program called the Everchanging Book of Names, which really rocks for alien cultures. You can set up your own parameters and rules for naming systems and then the machine will generate them for you. It’s really helped me with consistency of naming rules on this project.

Here is a snippet from this evening’s work. This is my first effort to write an alien story with no human as an entry lens for the reader.

Duurir clasped his hands together in childlike glee. He uncovered the bowl of kamjipp melon that had so teased her with its sweet scent. “I remember you said that you didn’t like to mix food, so I only brought fruit..”

Pimi accepted a piece of melon and wrinkled her nose at the memory. “True. We were all dreadfully ill after your mother’s party.”

The ground slammed up against her. Duurir shouted, dropping the bowl of melon. A low rumble echoed through the dormitory, which pitched and yawed like the deck of a Tep-Tep’s ship. Pimi clutched the edge of the nest, gathering breath to scream.

And then it was over.

Duurir, on his hands and knees, drew in a shuddering breath. The bowl of melon had shattered into crockery shards on the floor. Pimi put her feet over the edge of the nest, but Duurir looked up. “Wait! There will be–”

The room shook again. Furniture creaked. Toppled. Pimi held on. She kept the urge to scream trapped in her throat.

When the shaking stopped, tremors continued in her arms and knees. If she had held any food, she would have vomited it in her desperation to flee.

Within the vast stone walls of the observatory, the air stayed chill and dry. The touch of the cool breeze alleviated Pimi’s wooziness somewhat, but she still gripped the iron railing as if the room spun around them, rather than the stairs following the curve of the observatory’s wall. Above her, Duurir chattered happily about lenses and refractions.

She plucked at the ribbons binding her waist, wishing for one of the food stalls that stood on every corner in town. Her mother would not hear of her visiting Duurir’s observatory with an even slightly belled crop.

As if thinking his name had invoked his attention, Duurir spun on the steps, “[Here I say something about telescopes that Pimi doesn't understand!]”

Pimi blinked, hoping that her dazed expression appeared to be awe and not the confusion she felt.

I’ve got to say, this is fairly overwhelming. I mean, I’ve got a giant Cyclops head in the basement. Do I keep that? Give it away? It’s huge! And what about the mailman’s uniform? Or the bag of plaster? Heck, what about the life-size mold of a Clydesdale’s head? Oh, and then there’s the box of spare parts for the Audrey II puppet that I’ll probably never see again. Choices, choices, choices…

IS THAT the way you go after a job? You may have a fine set of brains but you must have a voice to prove it.

If you are not as successful as you might have been, start out right by confessing to yourself that something is wrong. There is something which prevents you from appealing to those who have an influence on your income.

Perhaps Your Voice is to Blame!

Have you ever considered that the trouble may lie with your voice? Your contact with the world depends upon your five senses—sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Certainly you try to dress well and to be pleasing in the sight of others. Probably you have developed a fine firm handshake. When you entertain friends at dinner you serve food that will please their taste.

But—do you do one single thing to make your voice pleasing to others? Remember that your voice is the one thing which puts you in audible touch with the world. Your voice is to you what the telephone is to your community. Your voice can make your future or it can spoil it.

You get but one chance at any big job. Are you sure that your voice won’t kill that chance?

You should see the illustrations and read the rest of the copy.

Toward bedtime, I thought I was probably starting to turn the corner, because I had the urge to write, and the writing didn’t suck (I double-checked this morning). The fever broke during the night. Hurrah.

I’m left with a sore throat and a mild cough. It means that I can do some housework, but going to the studio is out of the question. Hopefully tomorrow. I still have six chapters to record.

-e- called and invited us down for porch food, though by the time we got down to her house the sun had set and the night had drifted toward cool. We elected to eat inside.

After dinner, we watched the 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt, which serves as a backdrop for the audio book I’m working on now. Astonishingly, Puck is played by a 12 year old Mickey Rooney, who does an amazing job. I mean really. This is one of the best Pucks I’ve seen. I’m not going to try to match the truly freaky laugh he does, but you’ll have to trust me that this is a Puck that you would not want to meet in the woods at night.

Hey. Hey! That means I can sleep in tomorrow. Whoa. I wonder if I’ll remember how.

I DIDN’T marry my husband for his money, I swear. I married him because he is brilliant, funny, compassionate and handsome. He is also unlike any man I had ever dated. You see, he has a job.

A man with a job wasn’t a situation I had much experience with. I was raised by a mostly single mother; my father, who lived with us intermittently, could not pay child support. We lived on welfare, food stamps and the charity of relatives. Our telephone connection was a fair-weather friend.

Except for the muscles rippling under his form-fitting dress shirt, Magnus Scheving at first glance bears little resemblance to Sportacus, the hyperactive, health-promoting hero he plays in the international hit children’s television program “LazyTown.”

Unlike Sportacus, Mr. Scheving does not have a thin black mustache that juts out as if he had recently been electrocuted. He does not reside in a dirigible in the sky. He does not have a ski hat-cum-nightcap permanently affixed to his head.

But both he and his alter ego are devoted to a single, impassioned cause: getting couch potato-prone children to exercise, eat good food and generally lead healthier lives. And somehow Mr. Scheving, the creator and chief executive of the vast entertainment and licensing company known as LazyTown Entertainment, has become one of Iceland’s best-known figures and biggest exports, a sui generis hybrid of Jack LaLanne and Richard Branson.

This is who I worked for in Iceland. You can read the rest of the article about Magnus at the NY Times website.

I had birthday greetings all day long, from friends online, family calling and getting to hang out with people I adore. Emily and I spent the day making monkeys, which was so fun and so satisfying. You know how good it feels to do something that you’re good at, especially when it’s still challenging and interesting? That’s the kind of work we were doing today. It felt great.

We wrapped up around seven and went to Grand Sichuan on St. Marks Place for dinner. Twenty friends descended on the place, filling two giant round tables. Stephen, Chris, Jenny, Aimee, Kris, Lon, Katie, Emily, Jessica and I were at one table. Jodi, Sam, FabulousGirl, Jed, Preston, Sarah, Kahlua, Jonathan, Julianna and Sue were at the other. I switched tables about midway through.

The food was great. Emily ordered a crispy fish, which was amazing–I’ll post pictures as soon as I’m back to my computer. We also ordered something called Bad Smell Bean Curd, because, really, how could you not? It was like crispy, mild blue cheese served with a pepper sauce.

Aimee read my runes, which was cool and strangely on point.

Afterwards, a smaller group of us trooped back to Jodi and Sam’s for Mom’s pound cake. Mmm mmm good. We talked until my birthday had passed. I like all of these people so much. Some I’ve known for ages; some I’ve just met, and they are all nice, funny and deeply interesting.

What more could a girl ask for on her birthday?

Well…my husband would be nice, but Rob and I got to talk a little bit on the phone. I miss him, but friends help make the birthday wonderful. Thirty-eight is looking pretty good.

The funny thing is, thirty-eight seems fine, but the fact that my twenty-year high school reunion is this summer is just not okay.

I’m going to treat myself to massage and then go out for Chinese food with a bunch of friends.

I had a splattering of writers over for lunch today, (including Jay, David, Kate, Dave, Merilee, Evan, Damian, Rick, Spencer, Chrissy, Christina) which was great fun. I don’t know what it is about a table set with china and crystal that makes me happy, but it does, so there you go.

I’m particularly proud of myself because of the allergy and food avoidance list for this group. I strove to avoid the following items: Eggplant, raisins, gluten, eggs, dairy, mushrooms, melon, fresh tomatoes, fresh fruit, cilantro, barley, bell peppers.

The only one I cheated on was the fresh fruit, because I made a blood orange vinaigrette and then served the blood oranges on the side as an optional garnish. Besides that, everything was allergy safe.

The conversation was a lot of fun; my face still hurts from smiling and laughing the whole time. I’m glad I had a chance to connect with these folks before I go haring off to New York. The nice thing is that I know I’ll see everyone online or at cons.

HERE ARE YOUR FOOTPRINT RESULTS:

CATEGORY GLOBAL ACRES
FOOD 2.2
MOBILITY 1.5
SHELTER 3.7
GOODS/SERVICES 3.5
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 11

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 GLOBAL ACRES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXISTS 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL ACRES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.4 PLANETS.

How many acres do you require?

Saturday, January 20
J.R.R. TOLKIEN BIRTHDAY BASH
With jugglers, live music by the Scraff Orser Band, the entire LOTR trilogy
and more! Come in costume to compete for prizes!
11 a.m. ’til close; music at 7 p.m. | Free | All ages welcome

Ever been to a J.R.R. Tolkien tribute party? Yeah, we didn’t think so (unless you came last year, or the year before that…). Celebrate the birthday of Tolkien by coming dressed as your favorite Hobbit, elf, wizard or other character from one of his amazing novels. We’ll have Hobbit-inspired food specials, the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy in the Theater, a performance by Willamette Radio Workshop and much more.

WRW will be doing The Hobbit’s Greatest Hits at 2:00. Don’t miss out.