Life

"When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life."
-anon

Cooking and Reading

... about sums up my life right now. There's gymming in there as well, but I'm down to 3-4 times a week instead of the coveted 6. Blame my social life.

To be honest, I've quite happily traded those two days of cardio for extra bedroom shenanigans. Same general end result, tho, yeah?

This week's most exciting thing was being reminded that The Women of Our Occupation has been published in Swedish. I received my contributor's copies and $50 this week. I promptly spent the $50 on a new director's chair (which finally caved in after 6 years of use and numerous repairs) and a proper spice rack.

Looking back on it, I probably should have bought a printer. Eh. Budgeted for that next month. The spice rack makes me happier.

Though I love my life, I've recently felt that old, lingering ache for a proper kickboxing class. I can't find any at my gym or at the Y. They'll hold them on occasion, but there's no regular month-to-month class, and most of the ones at the gym are held at 10am (WTF?). Fuck this spinning shit, where's my kickboxing?

Yeah, I miss it. You can only do weight training and triathlon cardio for so long before you just want to... you know... hit things. Hard.

I'll be starting college classes again in January, working toward that company-paid-for degree in Marketing. Because hey: who doesn't want to defer their student loans and broaden their skills base? And not have to go into debt for it? (epic win!)

I've also been spending a lot of time looking for freelance jobs, which are about as tough to find as you might expect. Generally, the freelancing gigs you get aren't going to be from blind resume submissions where you fight for attention with 300 other people - it's gigs you get from friends/colleagues who know that you write.

Overall, life is busy in a good way. Doing tons of research for book 3, which involves a lot of reading about murder, Islam, the Middle East, assassination, and bugs. It's a steady diet, right there alongside my new diabetic-friendly pecan cookies.

Work continues to feed me a steady stream of interesting projects that keep me in health insurance. I do love my day job, for all the craziness it sometimes brings. You just can't beat being paid (and health insured) to write for a living, even if you're sometimes stuck writing handouts about the difference in dependent status between a "qualifying child" and a "qualifying relative."

Life is bloody wonderful.

Off to Cincinnati on Friday.

"I No Longer Recognize Marriage"

I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.

Turns out it’s fun.

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.

She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,

“How’s your longtime companion, Jill?”
“She’s my wife!”
“Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.”

More Reasons Not to Live in Dayton

There's been a bit of an uptick in crime here around Dayton, for good reason. I often joked that I didn't have a problem walking around downtown Dayton at night cause hey, yo, I lived in South Africa. But now that thing is happening here that used to happen out there: all of sudden there are more and more people talking about how they or someone they know has been raped or had their car/house broken into. Downtown, broad daylight, nice neighborhoods, you name it. Random smash and grab.

Obviously, it's still nothing like South Africa, but as your poor of unemployed starts to grow - particularly as winter approaches - and they're not seeing any help, hope, or end in sight, people get desperate.

Dayton's been a dying town since long before I got here, but closing GM may just shut most of it down for good.

It's not that there aren't industries - there's aerospace and Wright State and lots of government jobs at the base. But there's not a whole lot of entry level unskilled jobs around here anymore, and Dayton still has a huge, huge pool of unskilled labor. Who are getting totally fucked right now. Not that things weren't bad before.

Why don't we have government-funded workers' programs that retrains people for new jobs after major layoffs? I met a couple of tower guys working in telcom who were retrained after major layoffs at a manufacturing plant nearly two decades ago. They got trained in telcom and suddenly had a future.

A lot of these jobs are dying jobs. It's why I'm lukewarm about bailing out the auto industry. It's in trouble because it's not working. Let's shift our focus to something that works. We have new and emerging technologies. We have job needs. We just don't have the skilled labor to put in there. And nobody wants to foot the bill for retraining, so a whole city dies.

Columbus and Cincinnati are nice, at least.

EDIT: It turns out Dayton *does* have a place like this (thanks, Tyim!). God knows Dayton has enough jobs in aerospace and the health industry. There are people to do the work. They just need the training.

First Female 4-Star General, Ever

Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody.

Your Weekly Address from the President-Elect

It really is going to be just like FDR's fireside chats.

In fact, if you start to read some of those FDR transcripts above, you'll see an interesting parallel, and I wouldn't be surprised if Obama used them as templates.

It's so awesome to have smart people in charge of the country again. Win or lose, at least I can be proud of them.

Diabetic-Friendly Cream Cheese Pecan Sugar Cookies

I just about keeled over when I tasted these:

Cream Cheese Pecan "Sugar" Cookies

Cookies:
1/2 cup Splenda
1/2 cup butter
1 egg
1/2 cup almond flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup pecans
dash of salt

Frosting:
1/2 package cream cheese
2-3 tsp vanilla
2 cups Splenda

Cream together 1/2 cup Splenda, butter, egg, baking soda, salt, vanilla. Then add almond flour and pecans. Stir together well. Spoon batter onto ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 8 min at 375.

While it's cooking, prep the frosting. Mix together softened cream cheese, vanilla, and Splenda.

Once cookies have cooled, cover in frosting. Sprinkle with pecans and gobble up immediately.

About 12-15 carbs per cookie is what I'm estimating right now. I ate three of them, and they're rich enough that I feel a little sick (who would have thought it was possible to make diabetic-friendly cookies this rich and gooey and tasty? Certainly not me).

All things are truly possible. Enjoy!

For Tonight:

This (substitute potatoes with eggplant).

And this (mine was slightly overdone).

Wiscon

$470 from Cincinnati to Madison?

WTF people, I could have flown back to WA this time last year for that price (I paid something like $250 last year for the exact same flight).

Here's to hoping airline prices catch up to gas prices before the con.

Mmmm Credit

My credit card company, which I'm planning to ditch when I pay off the last 5K (I have another 4k on a no-interest card right now, which I'm paying off at a slower rate), just raised my credit limit to $20,200.

My God, yo. And they wonder how I got myself into financial problems in the first place.

This just seems obscene to me.

Holy Smoke

When I grow up, I want to be Kate Winslet.

P.S. I will never, ever, ever understand WTF it is Jane Campion sees in Harvey Keitel. Or why the fuck she has to slap on those stupid, stupid, stupid feel-good addendums to otherwise interesting movies.

Progress

Not as fast as many of us would like. But it can happen.

Keep fighting.

OmniPoddery: At least it's not a 30% failure rate this month!

I was looking forward to blogging about how I'd gone through an ENTIRE BOX OF PODS without having one of them fail... and then the last one in the box failed this morning.

It wouldn't have been so bad, but the one I was wearing had come unstuck this morning, so I went to change it out with my backup at work. At 10am. And it was my backup that failed.

After the last hellish experience I had nursing myself through a day at work when my pod failed at noon, I decided to trek it home and get it replaced.

Note that this is the post-diabetes, post-layoff, post-Chicago Kameron talking. The default part of me wanted to stick it out. It's embarrassing asking your boss if you can either take a half day or work from home. I have a ridiculous amount of "You show up and do your job" work pride, and I warred with myself over it for about 20 minutes before I gave in.

Why did I give in? Because I remembered how fucking awful I felt last time I nursed a failure with shots-every-hour insulin, and how it took another day and a half just to get back to my old self afterward. If I don't have to force myself through that... why would I do that?

There's tough - knowing that yes, if I have to, I can do that - and then there's just willfully stupid... doing it for the principle of the thing.

So I asked my boss if I could work from home, since busing it home and then busing it back meant I wouldn't get back to the office until after 1pm anyway. He was OK with that (there are advantages to being a writer - you can write anywhere), so I'm working from home today; I only have a couple of small projects.

When I called to report the pod failure, I was actually pretty OK with it. I honestly don't mind a 1 in 10 or 1 in 15 failure rate. That's OK with me. It was very civil. It's that 30% failure rate that starts to fucking grind on you.

I really hope this rate keeps up, because my sugar over the last month has been totally stellar.

I like being healthy. I like being sane. There are too many awesome people in my life right now to screw it all up over bruised pride.

Sometimes you should actually take advantage of offers - like working from home - that will save you and your loved ones a lot of pain and discomfort later.

That's what it's there for.

That's what I keep telling myself.

One for the Road

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

- Thomas Jefferson

Dear Book Three:

Please stop trying to write yourself in FIRST PERSON.

Save that for Twitter.

Thank you.

The Euphemism Generator

You know you want it!

Today's Readings

It's all wars and assassinations. Nothing to see here. Move along.

One For the Road

My life closed twice before its close -
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

-Emily Dickinson

My Latest Addiction

E.S. Posthumus radio!

Because you can never have enough good stuff to write by.

Busy

So, this is life without WoW.

Holy crap, it is busy and full of things, yo. When you get your ass back to work, you start to wonder what the fuck you were doing the last two months.

I really do like this life a lot better than the one I've been screwing around with the last two months.

Fuck, I have a lot of work to do.

On the upside, I have a feeling that the downtime helped me recharge my batteries.