Monday Miscellany 070119

Took a staycation starting Saturday for this week, so that’s fun. Though so far, all I’ve done is sleep and putter and read. And groom the tiny schnauzer so that he is more “dog” and less “dust mop”. Today I need to Get Shit Done.

On the agenda: to deal with the slow motion immolation of my phone battery. I replaced the phone with a usable one, but now I have the old phone to deal with. I wasn’t thinking clearly, or I would have cleared and reset the old one to blankness, then all I’d be looking at is throwing it away safely. But nope. So now I have to get the battery out and take it somewhere that will dispose of it properly. Weirdly, no one seems excited about being given a slowly expanding battery. Go figure. Also on the Agenda of Boring Shit That Still Has To Happen: take clothes to donation center, do grocery shopping, go to the post office. Bleh.

Errands. My least favorite chore.

Listening to: Miley Cyrus’s “Mother’s Daughter”. I like her voice a lot, and this song is super appealing. Plus fun to sing along with.

Dipping my toes back into podcasts. I’m catching up with “The Magnus Archives” after a run of episodes that hit my every “Eek! No!” button. But I finally just decided to skip those and keep going. So far, no problem. Also started listening to “Unwell” but I’m only the first episode in. I think I’m going to like it.

Finished reading NK Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month and, in no surprise to anyone who’s read any of her books, it’s an excellent collection. Only two stories failed to land with me. Out of 22 stories that’s a really good satisfaction rate for a single author collection. I highly recommend it! My standouts: “City Born Great” which you can find on tor.com to read. “Valedictorian”, “L’Alchimista”, “The Narcomancer”, which is set in the same world as the Dreamblood books, and the New Orleans after Katrina story “Sinners, Saints, Dragons and Haints in the City beneath Still Waters”.

My PRECIOUS! AKA The One Fork

Sometimes it becomes apparent that what bonds you and your siblings is not just blood, or experience, but shared crazy.

Apropos of nothing, my baby brother texted me a picture of a fork. Labeled it THE ONE FORK. And with this text.

BTW: this is the ONE fork.
It came from the house of Robins.
I can find no other like it.
To clone it is my Xmas wish.

I agreed instantly! I had TWO of those forks. And this is how I know I’m not a selfless big sister. He asked me if he could have one…. One of my TWO?!?!

Obviously, desperate measures had to be taken.

Whipped out the research gene, and lo and behold, the forks are still available! Used, of course, and randomly spread across internet auction sites like eBay, etc. But there they were! The ONE TRUE FORK! OUR PRECIOUS!!

I sent him the link. And then decided, hey, two of these forks were nice, but more? More would be better! El Niño came to the same immediate conclusion. The texting lapsed.

It lapsed… suspiciously. Pretty much the length of time it took each of us to find our wallets, our credit cards, and start shopping. Cue a buying spree in two states in two time zones.

I purchased six more of The One Fork! My brother, losing his mind with excitement, purchased about five forks, two random knives, and a bunch of teaspoons, all in the same pattern.

The thing you have to understand is that this is a cheap fork. It’s not like we were losing our minds over missing pieces of Granny’s sterling. No, this is a stainless steel fork that is about one step up from a durable plastic fork.

It’s EKCO brand, which is about as inexpensive as you can get and still have the flatware not bend with use.

It’s not a particularly exciting pattern. A basic chevron with a couple of random swirl dots at the end.

We don’t even know where these forks came from: our mother denies all knowledge of them, and in fact has been known to sneer at them.

So why, oh why, do we love this particular fork so much?

Easy.

It’s stabby!

It’s lightweight and it pierces everything you poke it at. You can eat a salad with it and stab a crouton right through the middle without the crouton crumbling! And if you’re missing a steak knife, well, hell the sides of the fork are thin and sharp enough you can use it to cut with. These forks (3 of them exist for sure, and we may have to poll the other brother to see if he has any of them) survive everything. They are the first forks we reach for. They are the ONE TRUE FORK.

Even my roommate agrees. It happened organically. I have two of the forks. One of them is always in the dishwasher. And then, I realized, we were both subtly jockeying for the Stabby Fork at every meal. Ignoring all the “good” forks. It’s a mark of favor when one of us steps back and serves the other with the One Fork.

I can’t explain it. I don’t really know that I can even blame it on nostalgia.

But, at least I’m not alone.

And now, I have more of THE ONE TRUE FORK.

They’re perfect. They’re the exact same fork, only lots shinier. And I think I’m going back for the teaspoons. Why?

Because they’re stabby at the tip.

A miscellany post

AKA things that I have been up to.

Preparing for the holiday cookie siege. I made chocolate chips, and gingersnaps, and following Sally’s Baking Addiction recommendation, froze most of them in little raw balls of dough ready to be baked. I always forget how much I love doing that. You can freeze cookies for later (as long as the fat content is high and you wrap them well), but nothing really beats yanking out a half dozen cookies and having them bake up fresh whenever you want a treat. I really always mean to do this year ’round and forget.

Someday I will treat puff pastry with the respect it deserves. But this was not that week. My roommate cooked up a bunch of local apples with cinnamon and butter and cloves and I bunged a bunch of them into the world’s most haphazard puff pastry wrapping. They kind of looked like softballs caught mid-explosion, but tasted delicious. And while I was at it, I used up the nutella to make puff pastry pockets. I would have used lemon curd, but tragically, it had gone bad.

And reading. I read a lot but every so often I lose it and go on reading binges. Usually when I find a new-to-me author who has not only an enjoyable book, but an entire backlisk. So Clara Coulson. Yeah. Her books are urban fantasy fun, and I devoured pretty much all of them between the 9th and the 15th.

CoulsonFatePortends That’s three of the Frost Arcana, five of the City of Crows, and one stand-alone Lark Nation novel. Just a heck of a lot of fun, though I’d say the Frost Arcana are probably the best entry points. Cal Kinsey in the City of Crows takes a little getting used to. If he were a heroine, they’d be lining up to call him a Mary Sue. Mostly Clara Coulson scratches the same itch that Mercedes Lackey used to. I can’t wait for more of her books! If you like adventure based urban fantasy with a surprising amount of super-violent action and great fantasy elements, this series might be for you! Seriously. After a celtic fantasy binge that lasted through most of high school, I was kind of burned out on the seelie/unseelie/sidhe/tuatha de danaan mythos. These books make it all feel fresh again.

Things that I have not been up to:

Writing. Ffs. I’m about six thousand words into Book 2 of the fantasy series and sort of stopped working on it. There are reasons (decent ones), but primarily it comes down to lack of organization. Life gets busier and busier in the fall and I need to take steps to make it easy to sneak a few hundred words here and there. It’s easy to get hooked into the crutch of the perfectly set up desk with all your note files and scrivener and the white boards full of maps and the walls full of setting pictures and character images, but when you do, you find yourself thinking oh, wish I could work, but so-sad, I’m out of the office, and not near my desk. So, I’m trying something sensible and slightly new. Setting up the next scene and tossing those few paragraphs into google docs so I can access it while at the day job, or out and about. I can read the plan on the phone and write on paper, or I can read it on a desktop and write directly into g docs. Failing everything else, at least I can keep thinking about where I want to go in the scene!

And a snippet of what I was last working on.

Genee’s feet turned her toward the side stairs and the guest quarters, not to seek her own rest, no. She might not know where Cavenner and her boys had bedded down, or even where Calyx Favager had slunk off to. But the girl…
Genee had made sure she knew exactly where to find her.
Sianan Maccuin jerked to attention when Genee melted out of the stairwell’s shadows and Genee made another mental note: More light. GreenStone Hall was as dark as a tomb.
“Commander,” she said, but quietly. “Do you need…?”
“She hasn’t come out?”
“Been quiet as a mouse,” Sianan said, “Did she really….?”
Genee waited. Sianan had a sneaky habit of talking in questions, letting people fill in the gaps. She learned more than she should that way. But she wasn’t supposed to apply that to her commander.
Sianan shrugged, “Sorry, Commander. Just… it’s such big magic, and it shook all the walls…. Hard to believe such a small girl could do so much damage.”
“She’s a Favager,” Genee said. “They’re nothing but damage waiting to be unleashed”

5 am and miscellany

So the puppy needed to go run amok at 5am; a heavy work load currently means she’s been a bit neglected and the boredom has built up. So out she went into the yard, a neon pink flashing circlet around her neck–have you ever tried to find a black dog in the dark?? Then the little old mini schnauzer wanted to go out as well.

Twenty minutes later, every one is inside, given a cookie, and taken back up to bed. I lay down and the 5am questions began: how screwed up is my shoulder/neck tonight? Should I take an advil or a muscle relaxant or will I be able to fall back asleep? If I do take a pill, I will have to eat something, and while I’m contemplating the idea of wandering back downstairs to joylessly eat a few saltines, Jeffrey (the schnauzer) prompted an entirely new set of questions: Where does he GET the damned spiders and why has he put one on my face!!!

This is a recurring question, sadly. I swept the spider off, turned the lights back on, and cleared my sheets of an annoyed wolf spider. Then I took the dog back downstairs and removed the other spider clinging to his fur. This is the second time Jeffrey has come in from the yard in the middle of the night wearing spiders that he generously shares with me.

I am going to have to institute a spider check at the door, to go along with the other procedures: no sticks? No rocks? Feet not too muddy? Did you roll in something I don’t want to smell in the house? Are you wearing spiders???

I am very grateful to not be alarmed by spiders.

Still fighting the revision, though I’m hopeful that once I get through chapters 18-22, matters will get easier. No snippet today though.

Listening to Meg Myers’ Take Me to the Disco. So far, a lot of powerful songs. My favorites are probably Jealous Sea, Little Black Death, and Funeral. Also listening to Kandle and really liking her as well. Discovered her via July Talk’s Peter Dreimanis doing backing vocals for When My Body Breaks.

Pastelitos! Or an excuse to eat puff pastry.

Though I live in the midwest now, reasonably content, I grew up in South Miami, surrounded by Cuban food. And every now and then I miss it sharply and terribly.

So the good thing is that we live in a global economy and I can get Cuban foods and ingredients even though I live pretty much in a non-Cuban society. Kansas has a large hispanic population, but it’s not Cuban-hispanic. And there is a difference, right down to the languages. About like British English vs. American.

This took me a long time to get over when I kept going to hispanic food stores out here and wanting “galletas” and being directed to row after row of cookies. No, I kept trying to explain. That’s not what a galleta is to me. But finally, it dawned on me that I could just hunt up a Cuban foods store and hey, have galletas—unsweetened hexagonal thick crackers with an appealingly sandy texture—delivered to me. As well as Cuban sugar cookies which are called torticas, thank you, not galletas…. Life improved.

And then I realized I could order guava paste. I don’t do it all the time. In fact, it’s a once a year thing. I cave. I order a bunch of guava paste, buy multiple boxes of puff pastry, and settle down to make pastelitos– puff pastry sandwiching a filling of tart guava and cream cheese.

It’s more assembly than actual baking/cooking, and my god there is nothing in the world as sticky as guava paste. Which is… probably my least favorite sensation in the world. Sticky.

So making them is always an exercise in slicing guava, peeling the guava paste from the knife, laying down the guava slice, running to the sink to wash my hands. And doing it all over again until the guava paste is all sliced up.

Worth it, though for the way my friends and family greet the results.

That’s my Monday.

Currently reading: NK Jemisin’s The Stone Sky

Currently listening to: The Bridge podcast for my Speculative Chic 2018 Resolution

Down the Rabbit Hole

So a couple of years back, maybe more than that, I wrote a book called Gatecrashers, that… well, kind of crashed and burned. I intend to revise it one of these day. With all my copious spare time.

Anyway, the actual point of this is that Gatecrashers revolved around a man who looked for missing persons, which led me to reddit unresolved mysteries, and though the book finished long ago, I keep reading the site every so often.

Most of the mysteries are just that: mysteries, with no hope of solution (at least not any solution from reddit readers, home sleuths, or wanna be web detectives). Except… there’s always one that has to nag at you. That feels eminently solvable if only you can get enough eyes on it.

There’s always the mystery that you stop reading about and start obsessing over.

I finally ran into mine.

The Flat Tops John Doe. I just keep thinking: someone out there knows him! And now there’s a sculptural reconstruction. He wrote a confident, kind of funny letter before he died, and someone with no one in his life wouldn’t have written that letter. I don’t know why he was alone out there. I don’t know if he went out intending to die, or if it was accidental or if it was a combination of both. I don’t know why they recovered money but no ID (presumably it was corrupted by decay). The letter is fragmentary, but his personality comes through in his words and in his lettering–all caps, except for the letter i? The reconstruction gave him a distinctive face. And in the grand scheme of things, 2004 was not that long ago. They put his death sometime between 1999 and 2004 (the money recovered was all dated pre 1999).

It just feels like one of those events: that all it will take is the photograph reaching the right person at the right time and Mystery Solved.