... I have voted.
The dayjob wants me in town for the whole day on election day, as opposed to my usual Monday. So, I got me an absentee ballot. I walked to the clerk's office on Friday , filled it out Sunday, and posted it on Monday. Voting from the privacy and comfort of home is awesome. I got my League of Women Voters circular and settled in for an hour or two of reading and contemplating my vote. Yes, I take my vote very seriously, and if I didn't, my life would be in peril, as my paternal grandfather would rise from his grave and stalk me as an undead zombie until I hied myself to a polling station.
So. I don't really feel a need to comment on the ballot; all you Michiganders should know what's coming, and anyone who knows me should probably be able to figure out how I voted. There is one proposal I feel moved to speak about: dove hunting. This bill really gets my goat. Doves aren't vermin, they aren't overpopulated, they aren't a nuisance, they don't harm crops, and frankly, there's hardly a scrap of meat on them. They're cute little stupid cooing birdies with baggy lower eyelids that make them look perpetually tired. Shooting these things is tantamount to live target practice: you might as well go down to Petsmart, buy a cage of budgies, and shoot those. Honestly. I'm hardly opposed to disposing of critters that are destroying property or livelihood, and I'm all in favor of hunting, but for crying out loud, if you're going to go out and end the life of an animal that's doing you no harm, you'd darn well better consume it and clothe yourself in its hide. Anything else is seriously disrespectful to the animal.
Also, my Gram was seriously opposed to this bill. I strike my vote for her from beyond the grave! Har har! There's a post worthy of Hallowe'en.
Happy Halloween!
My vacation hath vanished like the October Snows. I got a metric tonne of work done during the week, and kinda slacked off on Saturday and Sunday. I got the house cleaned, cooked some, and slept like the dead. This is okay, because I essentially worked three sixteen-hour days on the book, and I did get at least a couple hours work in each day.
My brain's too addled for a full writeup, but a few things bear mentioning:
* Kraut v 2.0 was a stunning success. We ate it with chicken brats and canned two additional pints. JimO and Kat have one of them; they got a mailbox full of kraut as their Halloween Trick. Kraut 2.0 was so good that I bought a hayoomongous five-pound cabbage and made more.
* I planted the second batch of tulip bulbs in the backyard, and now I totally can't wait for April.
* I pledged to WBEZ and will be receiving the sneak-peek DVD of the upcoming This American Life cable series. I am giddy as a schoolgirl.
* Nothing sucks worse than finding out the inks you just laid down were fugitive. I had to thick-paint most of the last two pages, thereby doubling the amount of time they took.
* I am now the proud owner of the new Absolute Sandman. ("Hey, Regular Sandman Comics!" "Hmn?" "Shun!" [*link NSFW*] ) It is a huge and mighty thing of beauty. We sat down last night and went page-by-page with the old versions: the differences are astonishing, and really give those early issues their due. I could never really appreciate them before, thanks in large part to the wretched powder-blues and pepto-pinks the previous colorist was so fond of using (I know it was the late-eighties. They still sucked.).
* Dessert Martinis are yummy, but they really foul me up the next day. Oy. I'm sticking to Bailey's and Coffee from now on.
* I've been going to the gym for over a month. My waist is shrinking. The scales say I'm losing weight. Why can't I fit into my jeans?! I've got really, really muscular legs now, or so I'm telling myself, and muscle is bigger... and wobblier... than um. Yeah. Glutes of... something. Oatmeal?
* Speaking of which, Blueberry Garam Masala Oatmeal loses its charm after the third bowl.
* Homemade chili does not.
* Delicata squash is remarkably good, and tastes rather like chestnuts: sweet and earthy and nutty. I stabbed it with a knife, then microwaved it for ten minutes and just ate the flesh off the rind with a fork and some salt. Yum! I'm also going to toast the seeds and eat them; like an extra-added prize inside. I like to make them with sugar and chili flakes, like hot crackerjack. Next up: Butternut and Buttercup. Allez Cuisine!
So the working vacation's been pretty darn fruitful:
So.... all I have left to do to achieve my goal is to wrap these last two pages, scan them and their two loose bretheren, do the aforementioned dialogue, ballooning, guttering, etc -- and then Beta Readers will get a nice surprise in their inboxes. Keep your eyes peeled!
Johanna Draper Carlson recently posted a justifiably disillusioned blog entry about a new Wizard Magazine "quiz". Paul responded with his own version.
For those of you playing along at home: Yes, that's Jason W's heinie. You're famous, Jason! Or, at least your butt is.
I've been a good little hamster this week, and have gone to the gym each morning of my days off.
The primary entertainment at said gym is a large bank of televisions, located directly in front of the cardio machines. Since audio tracks from six different televisions would be deafening, they instead turn off the sound to all but one (usually ESPN) and put the closed-captioning on the rest.
The oddest things to watch with the sound off are music videos. There's usually one TV tuned to MTV, one to MTV2, and one to VH1. For the last month, between the three stations, I've seen maybe ten or fifteen music videos, over and over and over and over again.
Since there's no audio, and I know very few of the musicians involved, the conclusions that I draw are probably not what the video producers intended:
More later.
Thnks to everyone who shared their squashy love with me in the comments. I can't reply to specific comments here, like I could in LJ, so I'll just do a blanket reply to everybody here:
Wendi: Yes, it was a delicata. Good eye. Come to think of it, I love Yam fries, especially the ones they serve at Sidetrack, with the wonderful hot horseradish mayo. For some reason I don't think of those as sweet potatoes, though. Recipe is welcome!
Karen: Hmm. Good idea! Going half-and-half sweet and starchy potatoes-- never thought of it, but sounds good! I'll give it a try. The roasted idea sounds really good as well.
Tish: Yes recipes please yes.
Kat: Risotto? Oh, what I'd give for such skill, time and patience. My cooking abilities lately involve crockpots. Still, if someone else offered me melty squash risotto, I'd never say no....
Mindy: Yeah, I've heard of spaghetti squash, and I think I even had it a couple times as a kid, but I think I'd be more squicked out by that than by regular squash. The baked sweet potato "Fries" sound great though. I'll try that this week.
Jenn: If I only liked maple better. It's odd, but I'm just not a big fan. I wonder how that same recipe'd be with sorghum or molasses, though? It sounds good in theory, but maple just isn't a good taste for me.
Again, thanks to everyone who chimed in. You guys are awesomes.
I have a few vacation days left this year at work, and so I'm taking today through Friday off. These days were originally scheduled for sometime in November, but things got shuffled around to accomodate projects and coworkers, so I wound up off today. This is not inherently a bad thing, since a) I've been pretty burned out lately and b) November's gonna be hellacious busy as well -- I could use a break before heading in.
I have also found that when things are just too damn busy, time off doesn't do me much good, especially when I'm trying to get work done on the book. When I get a day off in the midst of a sea of hella busy, I mostly just sit there and twitch, thinking about all the other stuff I should be doing instead, and end up bolluxing the whole deal by surfing the internets instead, in a perfect storm of stress-induced work avoidance. This happened two weekends ago, in fact. I feel even more guilty and self-loathing afterwards, and it's a nasty little cycle, compounded by the fact that I have no other free time to try and make up the loss. So. Yeah. Better to wait until a lull, then go in loaded for bear.
That's today. I stayed up late last night and did some impending computer work (designing a faux-art-nouveau cigar box, if you want to know -- french curves are so not my friends) and thumbnailed two pages, thus leaving myself a clear to-do list for this morning. I"m hoping to have both pages pencilled by the time we leave for Art Night tonight, and thus to ink them at the coffee shop. Having two more pages ready for toning is a Very Good Thing. Tomorrow and Friday I hope to lay in word balloons, do final touchup (such as dropping in the cigar box in Photoshop) and get the promised PDF out to beta readers a couple weeks early. Again, this is really necessary, because November's going to be a time-sink.
The general goal is to stay off the intertubes as much as possible, and get as much work done before Monday as I can. Wish me luck!
Hey, everybody.
I've set a pretty big goal for myself, and that's to get the next book done by the end of May 2007, which'll make it be in time to debut at the annual ALA conference in June. (Why there and not a comicon? Well, I'll be honest. I've sold somewhere around 25% of my books through the Direct Market, and the rest to libraries and bookstores, primarily libraries. Hear that, librarians? You can make or break me. And have. I love all you awesome librarians, and, in a more self-centered motive, I want you to all buy my next book just like you bought my first book.)
So. What's this got to do with the price of squash at the Kzoo Farmer's Market?
I'm putting out a request to all my buds out there to give me a call. Chat me up. Entertain me!
No, seriously. Throughout the winter, I'll need incentive to stay at the desk, to keep at work, and keep off teh internets. Um, like now. So, if you have the means and time to call me, all evenings except Mondays, between 8pm-12am EST, please do. Just to chat, and to help keep me moving forward. If you don't have the means, call me and I'll call you right back.
Thanks!
Ben Folds Covers the Postal Service. Awesome.
I just finished a really wonderful Audiobook: The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It even had a happy ending that was both plausible and enjoyable. It was also appropriately feminist, which also made me really happy.
Any other LMB readers out there that can recommend me a good jumping-in place for her other books? I hear the Miles Vorkosian books are good, but that they jump around in history. Where's the best place to start? Do they measure up to the Chalion books?
Today, I was whipping up another crockpot full of our favorite oatmeal. This time it was to be cinnamon-vanilla blueberry, sweetened with molasses. I reached into the cupboard, pulled out the plastic bag containing the brand-new cinnamon I just purchased from the CoOp, and dumped in about a tablespoon and a half. I added a little extra nutmeg and clove, just for good measure.
And then I realized: hey, that's not cinnamon.
It was Garam Masala.
Oops.
After letting it cook -- I really didn't want to throw out a literal gallon of oatmeal if it were even remotely edible -- it tastes a little wierd, but pretty good. It's a deep weird greenish-brown color because of the blueberries and molasses, but it tastes a little like blueberry chai. Or sweet curried blueberries. Or even a little like that hot sweet rice pudding you get at the end of the Indian buffet. I dunno if Paul will eat it, but I sure will.
Also: I ate my first sweet potato today, and it was pretty good. Okay, that's not entirely true. Today, I willingly ate my first sweet potato while not under duress. Its consumption fell under the heading of Trying Foods That I Used to Hate as a Kid in Hopes of Liking Them as an Adult, Because They Are Really Good For You. About five years ago I tried making mashed sweet potatoes with ginger and cinnamon, because I'd had a bite of a similar recipe from a friend's plate at a really good restaurant, and had enjoyed them a whole lot. But once I got them done, even piping hot, their texture hit my despicable smooth-baby-food gag reflex, and the whole pot, while delicious, went right down the garbage disposal.
This time, I elected to not puree the potato; instead I forked it, microwaved it, and ate it out of the skin with butter and salt. Lovely, and not at all gross. And please, no one send me any recipes involving marshmallows or excessive brown sugar: bleargh. I want to actually eat sweet potatoes for their nutritional benefits, not barf from oversweetened desserts with them hidden inside.
This is hopeful, because we bought three squashes from the farmer's market this week and I'm hoping to train myself to like squash as well. I actually asked the farmer: "Do you like squash? Good. I don't, but I want to like squash. What squash should I try?" So I've got two butternut (for Paul, because he already likes them), a buttercup and an oblong, cream-colored one with orange and green longitudinal stripes, which I can't remember the name of. If I don't like them roasted, it's no big deal: I'll just scoop out their guts, mash them, and make muffins. I know I'll eat them in muffins. And I have a recipe for pumpkin gnocci that I bet'd work just fine with butternut squash; I hear they're interchangable.
So yeah. Squash, sweet potatoes. Hopefully Good Eats.
Neil Kleid posted this really thoughtful, wonderful interview with me on Newsarama. You should totally go read it.
I'm okay, really. The "Fiery Studios incident" i mentioned a couple posts ago was really not a big deal, and it's all over with. It was just a disappointment, nothing legal or scary or financial, and i'm not going to address it here online for everyone to read. Yes, that's right, I'll discuss my bra size, but not the finer points of my business.
The good news is that no fewer than four people have either phoned or checked in with me about it, to make sure I'm okay. I love all of you guys very, very much. You are the bestest! friends! evah! Mwah!
1) Make a fireplace fire.
2) Go to the grocery store and do the shopping.
3) Use your pie cookers to make hot ham-tomato-and-brie sandwiches in the embers of the fireplace fire.
4) Cuddle on couch with husband.
5) Consume sammitches with spiced pumpkin beer.
6) For dessert: Dublin Mudslide.
Yeah, that'll fix even the worst day.
tired. stressed from work. sad from a recent Fiery Studios incident, discussed privately elsewhere. struck down by the recent gloom. frustrated with the book. patience reserves running low.
retreating into many cups of tea, and dark chocolate. think I'll light a fireplace fire, even though we don't need one.
John delivered another load of wood this afternoon. One more load and we should be good for the winter. I know I should just go out to my inlaws' farm and chop some, but I'm too dang busy. And lazy.
I have a lump of homemade cherry-vanilla oatmeal sitting in my gullet like a warm brick, and it feels really good.
Half my bulbs arrived today, so I planted croci and dwarf daffs in the front yard, and two sets of big bicolored daffs in the little fenced-in yard. I got one of the four kinds of tulips I ordered, so I'm saving those back until the other three arrive. I'm going to mix and match: orange, red, black and purple. If these do well, I'll probably order a bunch more for next year; nothing eases the ache of late winter like the gorgeous explosion of early spring bulbs.
I also finally got the purple astilbe and toad lilies I ordered in June, and the toad lilies looked brown and dead when they arrived; I planted them and covered them well in the vain hope that something will come of them in the spring. Sure hope they're hardy.
After returning from my usual rounds of market and coop, I was so tired that I took two forty-five minute naps. I'm sucking down coffee now in an attempt to wake up and actually get something done.
Heap big congratulations to Wendy and Steve Benedict, who gave birth to their daughter Alex Stephanie this morning at 7:30. She's seven pounds, four ounces, and mom and baby are both resting comfortably. It was a home birth, and a relatively short labor, to boot.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Ladies, rejoice: Organic Cotton Bras made in the USA.
Boo. Yah. Totally ordering from these guys. They even named their bras after me!
Woke up this morning to find nearly an inch of snow. More is blizzarding down now, heavily. Welcome to Michigan.
Haven't felt much like blogging lately, though it's not for lack of minutae to blog about. Just been busy as hell, at work and with comics and with family and with comics gigs, and I won't be out of it till the end of Novermber. I am, however, taking a long weekend, starting tomorrow, to buckle down and work on comics -- and skipping out on Motor City Comicon to do so. THis is really becoming seriously necessary if I've any chance in hell of getting the new book out by spring. I'd like to have it done by May, but even that will take a herculean effort. The current goal is to get the first hundred pages or so out to my Beta readers before Thanksgiving, and even that'll be a push. Oy.
Let's see, what else? I'll do a rundown of a bunch of little things, because it may be a while before I'm back and feeling up to my usual chatty cathy self.
Last weekend I was supposed to do a lot of work on the comic, but I was so stressed from dayjob work and comic work that I pretty much went loopy and cooked and cleaned and took out my agression on errands. This turned out to be a Good Thing, though, because I cooked ahead for the whole week, and we still have enough to last us into next week. Not cooking on weeknights is a blessing.
Our comic night at Rocket Star Cafe has been a saving grace for my productivity. Good company, good coffee, good motivation. Last week and this week we had our first "Cavalcade of Humilation", where we pulled out our earliest attempts at comics and mocked them openly. There's this monstrosity I did, circa 1994, from when I was still playing waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much D&D. It's really, really, really bad, so bad that I can't even look at it without cringing. When the originals turn up, I may post them for laughs, or I may set fire to them. It's seriously a coin toss, and well, it's snowing. We might just need extra tinder.
Our neighbor, dubbed "Loud Girl", is having a conversation with her boyfriend that I can hear, word for word, across the street and through closed windows.
The first attempt at sauerkraut was an abject failure. When the woman who showed me the recipe was putting it together, I said to myself, "That just can't be right. There's way too much salt in there for it to actually ferment," and know what? I was right. This time I followed the recipe in the Ball Blue Book and it's now burbling happliy away in the pantry. I don't have a crock or anything similar, so I used a set of nesting tupperware we bought for food storage. The biggest one is the crock, the lid from the middle one is the exact perfect size for a follower, and the smallest one, filled with water, weights the kraut below the brine. Then the lid to the big one gets rested loosely on top of the whole contraption to keep bad cooties out and prevent the pantry from stinking like sulfur. It's really fermenting quickly; loads of bubbles come out every time I check on it.
Devendra Banhart's new album is drastically superior to his previous work.
Paul currently has a gallery showing up at Smartshop. The opening was last Friday's Art Hop, which I didn't mention yet because I am a lousy wife. It went well, we had a lot of fun, and during the opening, I did a huge (10-foot) chalk drawing of an Angel with an oxyaceteline torch, welding her halo -- on the floor of the welding studio. There was a poetry slam, and a blues band, and lots of gorgeous art and sculpture.
I still want a corgi. Badly. Yes, I'm obsessing. Shut up.
Paul and I will have art in Richard Rubenfeld's upcoming "Leapin' Lizards!" EMU comics show. For those of you keeping score at home, this is Richard's third biannual show. The last one was really, really cool, as was the one before, and this one is shaping up to be equally good. You should all go.
OO! Someone finally posted a YouTube video of the New England Aquarium Moon Jellyfish 'Lava Lamp'. I lost like an hour of my life watching this thing. It's amazing, hypnotic, calming, beautiful, zen. And you get to change the colors with a dial.
Dang, it's still snowing, and coming down hard. This is the earliest I can remember it snowing in many years. This is not an incidental early frost or dusting, it's a real snow.
Oh, and while we're talking about aquarium stuff, have a Manatee squash.
I'm sad that I'm not at SPX, sad that I'll miss the Big Gay Dinner and the Annual TartFest and Shilling with the Cornwhackers and Backrubs with Catboy. Next Year.
Despite three full weeks of dilligent trips to the gym, I'm still not seeing much difference in the way my clothes fit. This makes me sad, especially since I'm being really good about not overeating. I did get one small victory, in that when I put on my belt and cinched it, it went three inches past the last notch. So... something good must be happening. Maybe my waist can share its success with my ass.
Um. Not much else for now. Work beckons, so off I go.
Ladies, I have a bra question for you. Gentlemen, avert your eyes.
I'm a 36/38D. Finding a bra that fits me, does not give me rocket tits or uniboob, does not squash or stretch or mash, does not show under a tank top and still manages to look half-decent is a task in and of itself. I have found said bra, the Victoria's Secret Shaping Full Coverage Bra. So, having found the Holy Grail of Bras, why would I want to look elsewhere?
Because I found out that they're made in sweatshops, and that VS is about as socially responsible as the Gap. This makes me sad. It also puts me in a bind, because my current workhorse bra is dying quickly. I need a new one, soon.
So I set out to find an American-Made bra, or at least a sweatshop-free one. Not bloody easy. There's American Apparrel but they only have candyfloss tinygirl bras that wouldn't restrain a third-grader. Decent Exposures seem to come highly-recommended on the internets, but they look so dowdy.
Anybody got any suggestions? Are Lunaire bras sweatshop-free? How about Bravissimo?
My boobs thank you in advance.
Still really loving the gym. Only hard part is getting there. I love how I feel when I leave. Hoping to keep it up, and hope to also start actually seeing some results. It's also humbling to look at the readout after sweating your ass off on the elliptical for thirty minutes, and realize that you could negate all that work with one candy bar, or five teabiscuts. Puts you on better behavior, I think.
U.S. Senate majority leader calls for efforts to bring Taliban into Afghan government.
Um. Yeah. So... the Senate Majority Leader now wants the Taliban back in charge of Afghanistan.
Didn't we, um. Start a war to prevent just that?
Sunday was gorgeous, not a cloud in the sky, so we went for a walk in the woods to blow off some steam. I wore a skirt and combat boots. (Some of you who attended college with me will recognize this as my uniform for nearly four years.) I've been so overweight lately, and all my pants are so tight, that I've forgotten how nice it is to move around unrestricted. We climbed up on stuff and played "Muppaphone" with a log full of puffball mushrooms, found little deer blinds, and ate fox grapes. The lsat four or five times we've gone, we've heard the distant tuk tuk tuk of a wild turkey, and though we've tried to triangulate and find one, we'd never managed to do so. I was eager to see one in the wild, because when I was a kid, they'd all been hunted to extinction where I lived. About ten years ago, the DNR finally pushed through some legislation and started reintroducing them. Tom and Jim have seen them for years during hunting season, and I guess there are a few pretty big broods in our home woods now. Still, i've never seen one on the loose -- so imagine how happy I was when we rounded a corner and saw a big fat hen turkey freak out and bolt across the clearing. She was a big girl, probably fifteen or eighteen pounds, with a pretty naked blue head. For a big bird, those guys can move fast!
Had a wonderful time this weekend with Dagny and Wendy at their dual shower. Kathy was in town from Kansas, I came out a night early and Tish showed us her spectacular bellydancing moves. She's amazing! I can't believe she's only been doing it a year. She taught us hip circles and arm movements and there's no hope I'll ever be coordinated enough to do both at once. Tish can do both, and stuff with her head, and move around. My poor brain crumples at the thought.
Then we all collapsed onto the couches and talked Girl Stuff. It was wonderful, and I realized again how much I miss all my college buddies. It's a little wierd that my closest friends are ones I made across a gaming table, but there you go. I thnk it's because most of us were huge nerds, and came from less-than-spectacular homelives and low-to-middle economic circumstances -- and college felt like a giant do-over. We'd all had rough times before, but we got to college and all just clicked simultaneously. We don't see each other as often anymore, but when we do, it's like no time has passed at all.
The shower itself was wonderful, and held by Steve's mom in her incredible house. The place is huge and beautiful, and the food was both gorgeous and delicious. The company was excellent, and I was very glad to see Jeff's wife Melissa, whom I hadn't seen since just after the birth of her second child, now almost two. Dagny and Wendy got all sorts of adorable baby stuff to turn their kids into duckies and pooh-bears, and we had a wonderful time petting all the super-soft blankies and stuffed animals.
Yay!