Push

Had to stop because there was so much *talking.* Blah, blah, blah, mutant shape shifters blah blah bugs and death and bel dames and untrustworthy magicians and resurrections and blah blah. Need to do some sleeping and sorting tonight of what I kicked out today and yesterday, refocus, connect it, and wrap this fucker up.

I want a fucking draft, and dammit. A reasonably coherent one.

Reasonably.

Tra la.

Non-Fail Cookery

Spinach and ricotta cheese quiche. Full of cheesy goodness and low carb to boot!


You'll need:

Handful of spinach
1 or 2 avocados (you can also try it with artichoke hearts instead)
1 container of ricotta cheese
1 package of garlic-herb spreadable cheese (like Boursin. Mmmm Boursin cheese)
A couple tablespoons of fresh basil (optional. I just so happen to have some growing on my porch)


Add together both kinds of cheese and eggs.


Stir briskly. Mmm briskly.


Add spinach, avo, salt and pepper. Stir some more until it looks like compost. I promise it will taste better than it looks right now.

Pour into greased baking pan and pop into the oven at 375 for 45 minutes. These incredibly good smells will start coming from your kitchen. You have 45 whole minutes to savor this!

When you take the pan out, your quiche should be nice and golden brown on top.


Cheese and cheese! For a truly sinful treat, top with finely shredded mozzarella, because if 2 kinds of cheese are good, 3 is truly fantastic.

Enjoy.

Omnipoddery

Spot the pump!

Dug up this photo from the first day I wore the Omnipod pump to work with a non-frumpy shirt. It's a lot stealthier than it sometimes feels.

Cooking Fail

Minced beef and tofu.

Not as tasty as you might expect.

Twin Peaks, Season 2

OK, seriously, whatever happened to Bob? You're losing the thread of your story now. We went from quirky hijinks in fucked up to town to just plain quirky hijinks, which honestly aren't as interesting.

Oh no, Agent Cooper, no!

Quote of the Day

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

People always think I'm trying to be deliberately rude when I say some snarky offhand remark before connecting the dots. 9 times out of 10, I'm just being socially retarded.

Cheap Thrills

I went out to lunch with the guys at work today, so I decided not to go to a show or bowling or anything tonight (it's all a tradeoff. I really needed to get out of the office, and I like hanging out with the guys, but I spent about $5 more than I wanted to. Water and the daily special next time, no sides).

Headed to the gym right after work, -75% of basal for an hour before and the hour during the workout. Didn't bottom out until the end. Took a lifesaver. Perfect 80 at dinnertime. For next time, -75% of basal an hour and a half before workout and half an hour during. Trial and error. There's no easy way out of it.

Walked over to the craft store across the street to look for a cheap (under $50) craft table, as I turned my pony mod table into my dining room table, and I miss my pony mods.

No luck, so I spent the evening walking among the local hotrod club cars assembled in the parking lot, then went over to The Greene and listened to some live music. It was a gorgeous summer night tonight. Kids dancing at The Greene. The whole fake town lit up. People eating ice cream. Security guys on bikes. A loud Ohio rendition of "Save a horse, ride a cowboy."

Walked home, wrote two or three thousand more words of my version of The Empire Strikes Back (have I mentioned that Empire was my least favorite movie in the series? That explains a lot about my struggle with this book. It's a necessary book for the series arc, but a difficult and sometimes not-fun one), and listened to loud music.

Tomorrow: pancakes, loud music, and a bunch more words.

Now: blessed, lovely, fantastic sleep.

Juicy.

Long Push

90K or finish by Sunday.

Dare me.

You'll Be Seeing a Lot of These This Weekend

Just bear with me.

As of Next Month...

I will owe less than $10,000 on my Credit Card (back down to four figures, baby!)

I haven't seen four figures since before I got sick.

Mmmm health care and job layoffs, oh my.

But I'm actually doing this thing, yo.

Holy Shit

The last one of these I posted was back in March, and it looked like this:



What the fuck have I been doing the last five months? Besides moving and having a day job and getting on the pump?

Fuck, no wonder I've felt so fucking wacked out.

As of this morning:



Yeah, seriously. 3K in FIVE MONTHS.

On the one hand, fucking five months of nothing. On the other hand, I've gone over it so much in my head now that it feels more like I'm transcribing something that already happened instead of making something up. Which isn't quite as fun, but it does get it to get the fuck out faster.

The realistic goal is to hit 85,000 this weekend, but let's be fucking serious here.

I SHOULD be hitting 90K.

I can't believe that I really took a 6 month writing hiatus.

Dayton, OH - One of America's Fastet Dying Cities!

Yeeeeaaaah....

A year or two for some more corp copyediting on the resume, a car next year, and then it's time to get outta dodge.

What I Want Tonight

To get a decent night's sleep.

And sneak out of the office at 4:30 tomorrow.

Then plan my writing schedule for 2008/2009.

Again.

Workadoo

Work weeks when I have big projects due tend to be kind of crappy weeks, yo. I missed both of my workday workouts because of work meetings and was hopped up on too much diet Coke, which meant I was far more jumpy and anxious than usual. Which means I'm not sleeping well. And I've been avoiding the cardio sessions at the gym since I got the pump because I knew that leveling for a cardio session was going to be a fucking bitch. So I avoided it.

The one awesome thing I had control over this week was my going-out habit that I've been working to crack (once or twice a week at Chipotle is a serious problem). I'm stunned to say this is the second week in a row that I haven't given in, mainly due to that whole budgeting thing. Doing so well last month has made me want to do good this month. Also, I have a hankering to go bowling *and* see a movie this weekend. Which requires said fun money. I'm also putting away to buy an elliptical for the apartment. Winter isn't far away, and having it around when I'm too cold to go to the gym will be great for my peace of mind and my sleep.

I did finally do a cardio session at the gym today after work, the first with the pump, and it was predictably shitty. I decreased my basal by 75% and ate three lifesavers and bottomed out twice. I hung on for 35 min instead of the regular 45 and then called it a night. Cardio at the end of the day just kills my sugar.

So I'm thinking of doing something like a -25% 2 hours before, -50% 1 hour before and -75% during to bring my sugar up enough to work out.

It's just a matter of getting the numbers right, and sadly, and fucking frustratingly, it's just a matter of trial and error. And I fucking hate it. But the alternative? The alternative is to just hide in your room and just not do anything cause it's just too hard, too much trouble, because failing is easy and discomfort is hard.

And who the fuck wants that?

But man, I fucking hated it. The worst part is over, though. I went to the gym for the first time on the pump, and didn't pass out. Honestly, any day I don't pass out I should count as a good day. Sometimes I don't think I give myself enough credit for how well I've done (with the incredible support of Steph and the Old Man and Jenn before them). I mean, seriously, an A1c of 5.9 at one point, and never above 7. Let's just hurrah over that, shall we?

Anyhow, back to the fucking book.

Resolutions for next week:

1) Drink less diet Coke
2) Get to the gym for the designated 4 timeslots, come highs, lows, or hellish waters
3) Write 5,000 words of Black Desert, because seriously, this shit needs to get done. I've got another series I need to sell. I have no idea why this fucker won't write itself. I think I'm lacking in proper motivation (we haven't even started editing the first book yet, so I think I'm being lazy. Quitting WoW, however, resulted in a sudden flurry of activity, so I'm gunning to have it done mid September).
4) Keep on keepin' on

Tra la.

Speaking of Non-Tudor Women

"Hassani's statements came after two Kurdish feminists in Iran were accused of being members of an armed rebel group and of carrying out subversive activities threatening the security of the state."

It's a good thing that all women are naturally passive, submissive and obediant, then. See, this is what I'm talking about. I want more stories about real women (whether or not the accusations are true is a whole different issue, but also interesting).

Writing Rewards

When, after 80,000 words, a new character (new to this book) finally starts to become a real person, and you realize you're very proud of how well she's grown up.

One For the Road

The Tudors

Showtime's version of Rome is... well... It has Jonathan Rhys Meyers, so it can't be all bad?

It's pretty, and there's politics, and, Jonathan Rhys Meyers? But holy hell, man, all the women in this story are sex bunnies used and abused by their respective male owners. You've got the Bolyn girls' father basically selling them out for sex to the King (there's a huge difference, I'm sorry to say, between a woman deciding to advance herself by seducing the king and a woman seducing the king cause her daddy tells her to).

I get that sex and women's bodies are historical commodities, but I just can't buy into a show that shows so many women as completely passive vessels. Where are the powerful matriarchs and scheming wives and willful daughters (Did Rome spoil me? And that's the sad thing, right, there were still way more male characters in Rome than female, but hot damn, the women charcters *didn't suck*)? One of the most dispicable lies in history is that women were just always passive slaves to men. That, historically, women had no power and no voice and contented themselves with their lot in life. If that was true, nobody would have burned witches, there would have been no laws against women owning property or having jobs, nobody would have considered wrapping up women's bodies or binding their feet or cutting off their clits.

You know why you make laws and powerful social mores that enslave a group of people? Cause they scare the living shit out of you. Because they have a lot of power. Because they are people too. And those people do what people do, and they often do it by whatever means necessary and whatever they have in their power.

Yes, women were confined by the restrictions of the times and societies they lived in, but you find ways to negotiate power and get want you want even with the worst of restrictions. You make it work. You play the game (a la Dangerous Liasons). There are always women with voices and women who get shit done. Not just the daily living stuff, but the deliberate work of kicking your husband's ass so he makes something of himself, getting your kids into worthwhile matches and positions, political backstabbing through gossip and rumor (and fashion!!), and whatever the hell else you have at your disposal. You use it because those are the only tools you have.

The tragedy of so much film and television and history books is pretending that these women never existed.

It makes me want to puke.

Stuff That Annoys Me

When people refer to Wikipedia as "Wiki."

This is Wiki. This is Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia is a Wiki, but it is not "the" Wiki.

More Creative Accounting

My water and trash bill is $18 less than I budgeted for! I can go bowling next weekend!

Being a grownup: not doing what you want to do when you want to do it, but when it makes financial sense to do it.