Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 39

Catching Up...

Of course the year I decide that my New Year's Resolution is to be better at corresponding, I completely fail to update my journal on a regular basis.  I blame the day job.  It's not that my new job at the library eats up THAT much time (it's only 4 hours and not even every day), but I tend to veg out a lot more after work and when I do have time, I've been trying to spend it writing.

Also, our entire family got the shonen flu/cold (so-called by me because it seemed to power-up at each person it hit.)  The last victim was Shawn and she was basically out with it for nearly a month.

...oh, yeah, and I killed my Mac Book Pro.

But, ,enough excuses.  The point is, I'm trying to catch up now.  For the first order of business, I should show off some of the things that have been happening.  Most notably, after the family recovered from our collective illness, we finally all sat down to tea and opened the care package sent to us by my friend empty_mirrors .  Some time ago, you may recall, I posted a picture of me trying fruitcake. My face was very, OMG WHAT?

My friend is from Wales and was fairly horrified by my reaction and determined that I hadn't had good fruitcake--which seemed reasonable to me, since fruitcake in America is kind of the punchline to a Christmas joke.  So, we decided to exchange fruitcakes.  Alas, the fruitcake shelf life here is about ONE DAY after Christmas, so I wasn't able to find our version to send. Instead, I went to United Noodle and packed up a box of Japanese treats including natto (which you may also remember me posting about eating.)  We send our respective boxes and waited.

Shawn thought it would be fun to have a series of UK days, in which we pulled out the fancy tea pot and dishes and such and made a kind of THING of of it.  Here's a picture of the contents of the box:




As you can see, empty_mirrors was very generous.  She sent us Jelly Babies (which I have a fond memory of eating with my mother in Oxford or maybe Canterbury), Jaffa Cakes (which my family had to hide from me after the second day because I was devouring them all by myself), treacle (because Mason wondered what it was, having read about it Harry Potter -- funny story to follow), and a number of fun fruit cakes.  She also sent along a package of her tea (I asked her just to send whatever she drank at home, so I could taste a bit of her life).

Shawn pulled out some of our fancier china and we sat down:



Looks lovely, doesn't it? The tea (Kngihtsbridge Red?) was very good.  If my parents are reading this: do you remember that morning in London when we got up early to go listen to the soap box speakers in Hyde Park?  I bought tea from a street vendor that morning?  It was kind of classically foggy and cold that morning?  Anyway, this tea is probably higher end*, but the taste reminded me very much of that experience, which is to say, this is now my FAVORITE BREAKFAST TEA EVER.
----
edited to add: empty_mirrors notes that "higher end" might be a bit kind, as this tea is half the price of PG Tips, for instance.  You wouldn't know it from the taste, however, IMHO.
----

Okay, here we are starting to dig in.



I should have taken notes, because can't remember the name of this particular cake.  I DO remember what it tastes like.  I remember expecting, from the looks of it, to be more cake-y.  Instead, the inside was a giant mass of squished raisins with a little bit of wheat flour gumming it all together.  My adjectives probably don't make it sound very appetizing, which is unfair.

It was tasty, but I would also use adjectives like DENSE. And, via Skype, empty_mirrors taught me the word "claggy" as a good description: meaning, "clay-like."  Shawn and I also spent some time trying to decide if Americans would call what we were eating "fruitcake."  We ultimately decided that what we could call it, particularly in terms of flavor (flavour), would be "spice cake."  And, like American spice cake, the predominant fruit in British fruit cake appears to be raisins.  There were other fruits listed in the ingredients, but raisins were really the largest percentage (in this one, I believe they were 40% of ALL the ingredients).

So yeah...fruitcake, we discovered, is a completely different thing in the UK.

In fact, I think the subtitle of this whole exchange experience could be: "In Which Lyda Discovers How Little English She Speaks."  Because treacle?  We got a can of it and we decided we should look up what one does with treacle ONLY TO DISCOVER IT'S MOLASSES.

The British have a different word for almost everything, I swear to God.

The treacle can, though, by itself, as a curio, is a cool thing.  For instance Shawn and I spent a lot of time puzzling out their logo. She sent us "Abram Lyle & Sons" Lyle's Black Treacle which appears to have a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of flies as its logo. After reading the tiny printed motto: "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" I had a vague memory involving the short story I wrote about Samson and his first, unnamed wife (sometimes called the woman of Timor).  Turns out, I was right, those weren't flies, they were supposed to be bees and it has to do with one of the weird-ass riddles Sampson uses to trick his Philistine wife.

But, yeah, that really IS supposed to be the carcass of a dead lion.

As a logo.

A logo promoting FOOD.

I should also mention that, on a separate occasion, Mason and I gobbled up all the Cadbury chocolates that empty_mirrors sent. Some of the textures were odd to me, because: airy.  Chocolate bars here in the US tend to a) be sweeter and b) more compact (if that's a thing.)  I liked the flavor of the Cadbury better than some chocolate here, but I felt it compared very similarly to Hersey's milk chocolate in terms of taste (feel free to argue with me, dear reader).  However, I'm probably weird in that I kind of prefer the waxy/smooth (?) texture of chocolates like Dove.  I should send some to empty_mirrors in our next exchange so I can hear what she makes of our chocolate.  I would expect "too sweet," but I'd be curious what she made of the texture.

Okay, on to more foreign treats:




Eccles Cakes... now these, I liked.  I was not, once again, expecting the center to be a completely dense collection of fruity mass.  However, there was something about these that worked for me.  A LOT.  I think these were my favorites of all the things (with the notable exception of the Jaffa Cakes which I would probably give a small fortune to possess and unlimited supply of). Maybe it was the really shortbread-y, flaky exterior.  Perhaps it was the fact that the fruit was just a gooey center, not mixed in with flour.  Whatever it was, I liked them.  This was the food, however, that made Shawn wonder: "When do you eat Eccles Cakes?  Are they a breakfast item...or what?"  So next time I was chatting with empty_mirrors , I asked.  She said: "Tea.  Think High Tea."

I think, if Eccles Cakes were to try to market to the US, however, they should totally sell themselves as a breakfast food.  In some ways, they're a fancier (less sugary) version of a Pop-Tart (Wiki link for my non-US friends). The package instructions even suggested that they'd be good heated in the oven (or microwave, though empty_mirrors cautioned that if we did that to be wary of pockets of super-heated fruit.)

The final fun cake-product was this:



Welsh Cakes.  These were also yummy, also very shortbread like: buttery and flaky.  Much like the Eccles Cakes, but the fruit was dispersed throughout, more like a scone.  But, as we were eating these, I noticed the packaging had this interesting warning:

[image error]

MAY CONTAIN STONES???  WTF.  My first thought, as an American was: Seriously? What are they processing this in a barn and they randomly pick up gravel or something and toss it in the batter??  What kind of insane food safety do they have over there in the UK???  I was ready to harass my friend about it when it suddenly hit me: stones.  As in "I gave my love a cherry without a stone..." what we would call a "fruit pit." Those British and their ridiculously baffling use of the English language don't mean stones as in rocks, they means stones as in fruit pits.

D'oh.

Like I said, I swear the British invented their language JUST TO TRICK US.  

For Garnet Lacey Fans

Just a quick note for any fans of my Garnet Lacey series.  My friend empty_mirrors has been listening to the audio books of the series and felt moved to write some fan fic.  You should check it out: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1159841

I'm sorry I've been missing in action again.  I had a bit of a computer trauma, as in, somehow, once again, I managed to completely and utterly destroy a computer.  This time I took out a Mac Book Pro.  In fact, it was so badly corrupted that when Genius Nick at the Genius Bar took it to the back room to plug it into their diagnostic machine, my computer FROZE their console.  To which, I said, as I patted the Mac Book, "Well done, you!"  Because, you know, if you're going to go out, go out with a BANG, I say!

But so I kind of have a new computer.  It's a brand new hard drive in the old case, so, you know, that kind of counts.  I had to reinstall all the things and reset all the preferences, so it feels new.  I gave it a new name and installed CrashPlan right away, but I tell you, if it keeps being stupid, I'm going to nickname it "Moon Moon." Of course, I might do that anyway, just because it gives me such perverse pleasure to shout out, "Damn it, Moon Moon!" (also I adore that there's a hashtag on Tumblr devoted to Moon Moon.)

Oh, and for those of you wondering what I did to kill this Mac Book, the answer is "exerted my mysterious superpower."  Because, unlike, say, the time known in certain circles as "the turkey incident" or even the "dropped it on its hard drive" moment, I actually only attempted to hard boot the Pro.  This, I was told by Genius Nick was simply "a Thing That Happens."

I did loose some stuff.  I hadn't gotten around to installing CrashPlan, so I lost a chapter of the sequel to Precinct 13 that I was working on, but, surprisingly that was all.  The rest of the stuff I had shared on Google Docs, so it was sitting there in the cloud, waiting for me.  :-)

I'll have more tomorrow, hopefully some pictures (finally) of me eating the fruit cake sent by empty_mirrors and the other yummy treats from the UK that we've been slowly devouring.

Sledding

Mason had a friend sleepover last night, and we took him sledding with us to the big hill over by the St. Paul Country Club.  I got a good shot of the boys climbing up the big hill together and another of the Minneapolis skyline:

My Subconscious Begs to Differ

As an interesting side note to the post I had about how I tend to dislike Iron Man, I had a weird dream last night in which my subconscious put in its own two cents on the matter.

The dream was weird and involved zombies--they weren't the super-scary zombies that have been popular in movies and TV lately, but kind of shambling, somewhat harmless but totally persistent kind-of dead people.  My dream voice-over informed met that the zombies couldn't break the glass of the windows and couldn't break down the walls, but they'd be there at every window and door just STARING in and moaning piteously, which was just CREEPY.  The biggest scare of my dream was that people kept wanting to open the door to someone they recognized who'd turned into a zombie (I blame you naomikritzer at least partly for this dream!!)  And that was bad because they did seem compelled to try to bite people and spread the zombification.

At any rate, the dream continued in its dreaming way, until, at one point, Tony Stark showed up and offered all of us survivors iron suits of our own.  At which point the dream BECAME AWESOME because: flying.

So, apparently, my brain said: "Look, Lyda, clearly Iron Man is a GOOD guy."

:-)

In other news, I've spent part of the morning working on the sequel to Precinct 13.  I think I finally have a motivational plan that will get me to the finish line on this one (it involves AO3 and my friend empty_mirrors .)  When I'm ready to post the first part for public consumption (which I hope will be very soon), I'll put up a notice here and at my other social media outlets, because if I can get people at least giving me a few 'keep going!' kudos, I might actually do this without stumbling into a well of deep depression.  The ultimate goal will be to have enough material to self-publish an e-book.

I think I also alluded to the fact that my agent and I had a good talk.  She did not, despite my worries, point me to the door.  In fact, we did a lot of strategizing about how to make things work for 2014.  I did have to laugh at one point, though, because her advice is often, "Your job is to write a bestseller."  To which I'm always tempted to sarcastically reply, "Wait, what?  I was supposed to try to write a book people want to read??? NO ONE TOLD ME THAT!!!"  :-)

But my agent has a good heart and is still clearly very much on my side.  So that's a huge relief.

Similarly, I've had a lot of offers of support from people, which has been truly heartwarming.  So, now I just need to not slide into self-pitying depression and I should be golden!

Having a job actually helps this, I've found.  I mean, obviously, working eats up writing time, but I'm surrounded by books and it's really only four hour stretches.  Having a steady paycheck also does a lot to relieve the pressure.  Because bills are now being paid and that means some of the crushing guilt I had about not pulling my weight around the house has gone away.  My checks are still tiny, but they're steady.  That's surprisingly important.

Plus, the job is going very well. As many of you already know, I'm a fearless extrovert, so this means working at the front desk is actually fun for me.  I don't mind not knowing what I'm doing and most people are patient when you explain you're new to the job and still learning.  Plus, the way Roseville works is that no one is on the desk for longer than two hours, so I get time by myself in the stacks every day.  I've found I LOVE that part of the job and the biggest danger there is that I forget what I'm supposed to be doing and sit on the floor and start reading a book about Shintoism or whatever cool subject I'm supposed to actually be shelving.  :-)

In other news, while Mason and I have mostly gotten over the laryngitis thingie, Shawn is STILL suffering. This one is nasty, folks!  Shawn said she found an article on the CDC's website that said this virus might be a relative of the dreaded H1N1, Swine Flu.  I'd believe it, if only because when you're in the throes of it, you feel like you seriously have the plague and are going to DIE. Alas, being viral there's not much for it, except tea and sympathy.  I've been trying to give Shawn plenty of both.

Right, that's all the news that's fit to print for now.  Back to writing sequel!  Wish me luck!

Lots of News and Thinky-Thoughts

After my post about the horribleness of fruitcake, my friend empty_mirrors decided to send me DECENT fruitcake from the UK, where she's from.  The packages arrived earlier this week and included some other UK delicacies that we can't get 'round here, including Jelly Babies and Treacle (because Mason always hears about treacle in the Harry Potter books and had to know!)  We haven't had a tasting yet, because Shawn came down with a horrible case of the laryngitis crud that we've been passing around the household, and we wanted to wait and have a special UK day/tea where we tried ALL THE THINGS and it seems unfair with her snorfling and unable to taste much beyond her own mucous....

With any luck, that will be this weekend.  I plan to take may pictures and post all our reactions.

But, poor Shawn, this cold/laryngitis thing has been growing stronger with each person it attacks (like a shounen hero!), so she's been really knocked back, far worse than either Mason or I.  I'm still suffering a tiny bit--my sinuses are still runny and my throat hurts, but I'm otherwise mostly over it.

The issue of British food (and fruitcake) came up last Friday when I dined with the Wolves (the good folks at Sofa Wolf had me over when my friend and fellow writer Kyle Gold was in town.)  Turns out, the Wolves make their own figgy pudding, which is another one of those things that you always hear about, but... at least in my case, have never had.  So I slyly invited myself to some holiday gathering so I could taste it.  I mean, it sounds like some kind of sweet version of haggis!  You make it one year and let it... ferment?... age?... in a cold, dark place for OVER A YEAR????  Seriously, I can't wait.

I had a lovely time, as usual, with the Wolves.  Afterwards, Kyle and I have been emailing back and forth percolating on an idea for a furry-type novel for me.  Could be fun, is all I'm saying, and at this point, I have so very little to lose.

In fact, later this afternoon, I have scheduled a phone call with my agent that I'm kind of dreading.  It's one of those that could go either way.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Also, since I was sick, I've been neglecting my around the house duties.  Today I tackled a pile of dishes.  One of the things I like to do while doing the dishes is watch Anime on my iPad.  It sits nicely in the windowsill above the sink, so I can do my work and still read subtitles.  I've gotten through Full Metal Alchemist, Free!, Attack on Titan, and Samurai Champloo that way.  I've just started Death Note.  Death Note is different from a lot of other shounen Anime in that our hero is... kind of a villain.  No, not kind of... totally.  The basic premise is that a death god, a shinigami, has dropped his notebook , into which the names of the dead are written, into the Human World.  A bright high school boy named Light find it and discovers that he can kill people by writing their names, times of death, and cause into it.  His plan, of course, is to use it for GOOD.  He starts by picking off condemned criminals.  But, what's interesting about the story is that the slippery slope is VERY slippery and pretty soon we discover when the shinigami comes to track Light down, that our "hero" plans to create a new world and SET HIMSELF UP AS GOD.

I spend a lot of this show not sure who to root for.  It's like "Dexter," without the funny/interesting insights into human nature from the point of view of a sociopath. The only thing that's compelling about Light is how smart he is.  But he's DEVIOUS-smart, which is compelling, but also kind of... scary, especially now that Light is trying to save himself from discovery.  I like the show a lot, but it makes me remember why I'm not terribly fond of vigilante heroes, like Batman.

I know everyone loves Batman, but Batman has never been a favorite of mine (nor his Marvel analog Iron Man), because essentially Bruce Wayne (and Tony Stark) is a rich vigilante.  Both heroes use money to give them powers that allow them to operate beyond the law.  Both heroes believe they're serving justice.  In the Marvel and DC universes, it's very rare that either of them make a mistake and it's clear that we're meant to believe they're right, they *are* doing the right thing for the right reasons and filling a real need.  What's funny to me is that I'm a huge fan of two other rich vigilantes: the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro, but in both those cases, the universe in which the heroes live is very clearly screwed-up and both heroes fight to protect those being harassed by corrupt governments.  You could make a case that Gotham is a corrupt government, but it's not usually portrayed that way OVERTLY.  Again, over in the Marvel Universe, the same could be said for New York (or LA, depending on if Tony is in the East Coast or West Coast Avengers at the time), but, you know, again not strictly obvious or overt....

I don't really know where I was going with this thought except to say that I guess shows like "Death Note" feel more honest to me, like a REAL exploration of what might happen if you have an intense sense of justice combined with the knowledge that sometimes the system fails to catch the bad guys/punish them properly.  And maybe some Batman story lines *have* dealt with this, I don't know.

I probably just don't like Batman because he has a butler.  Who has a butler in this day and age? (And yes, I KNOW some people still do, but do we LIKE them??)

Sick and Book Bad News/Good News

I've STILL got this laryngitis thing, which has now successfully passed through our entire family, from Mason to Me to Shawn (who just started to get symptoms yesterday afternoon.)  :-(

In the book bad news/good news category, I got an email yesterday afternoon from the small press Mad Norwegian Press who published the prequel/sequel of my AngeLINK books, Resurrection Code.  They're taking Resurrection Code out of print.

That's obviously the bad news.

Part one of the good news is that the Norwegians are being extremely generous in their parting offer, including sending me the remaining print copies for me to distribute as I see fit.  They've also reverted my rights including rights to digital books, and have even donated the cover art (which is possibly the most gorgeous art I've *ever* had on the cover of any of my books).  I'm going to have to decide what I'm going to do with the print copies, but it may be possible for interested people to buy them directly from me or through my ancient website--though if I do that, it may be time for a major overhaul, which I've resisted for years. Nay, decades.

But, part two of the good news is that I emailed my e-publisher, Wizard's Tower Press, the folks who have been returning the other AngeLINK books back into e-print, and asked if they'd be interested in doing the same for Resurrection Code.  To my extreme  pleasure, they said yes.

It was the kind of quick turnaround I really needed.

I'm off to work at the library today.  I work today, tomorrow, and Saturday in an effort to really finally learn the job.  You wouldn't think being a library page would be that difficult, but as I said before it's so much more than shelving books these days.  A LOT of what they have me doing is staffing the front desk, which means I do things like replace lost library cards, check people out who've forgotten their library cards (did you even know you could do that?), collect overdue fines, deal with damaged CDs, and a surprising array of other functions.  So far, I really enjoy it.  I mean, as far as jobs go, it has a lot of variety.  One of the first jobs I ever had was as a receptionist at an extremely busy switch line/front desk at college.  I had to a zillion things, including record a daily announcement recording about all the events on campus.  I really liked that job. I'm about twenty-five years older now and out of practice at being perky and pleasant, but I can feel the muscle memories returning.  :-)

Mostly I've Been Sick

I thought that I'd missed the horrible coughing thing that Mason had over Christmas break (we even ended up taking him to the doctor's on Christmas eve day because we worried he might have strep.)  But, alas, no.  I've been feeling pretty miserable these last four or five days and I LOST MY VOICE.

Perhaps you have no idea what a tragedy this is for me, but I can't talk!  Me!  Who loves the sound of her own voice so much that I've been known to carry on conversations with myself when I'm alone in the house!

Actually, I can talk, just not very well.  On Friday when I went to my library job despite feeling crappy I sounded like a deranged mouse.  They sent me home early because I really couldn't work the front service desk squawking and squeaking.  Now that the cold/laryngitis has progressed I sound a bit more like a growling bear.  So I guess it's improvement that I've moved up the food chain.  :-)

I used to kind of enjoy losing my voice because, in the past, I'd hit a stage where I sounded like some kind of sultry drag queen or jaded phone sex operator.  But, I guess that just cements the fact that I'm an odd duck, because I used to love to just say strange things out loud to crack myself up or call up Shawn's work and croon sweet nothings into the phone in a scratchy  voice.  Alas, if I tried that now it'd sound more like, "bark, snarl, growl!" and not much else intelligible.

I suppose I ought to mention the weather.  Apparently, outside my door right now, it's -20 degrees F/-28 degrees C.  I could guess it was cold because there's so much frost on the INSIDE of our windows, it's not even funny. I could hardly see out this morning before the sun came up and melted things a bit through sheer force of will.  -20 F.... that's probably the coldest I've seen things, ever, because I don't believe that temperature includes windchill, which I'd heard on the radio might be as low as -60 F/-51 C, which frankly is f*cking arctic.

The governor closed schools in advance, which, in my opinion, should be his re-election platform for next year.  "Remember that stupid cold day?  I didn't make you go out in it.  Vote for me!"  except I think Dayton might be on his last term, which is also a shame because he's possibly one of my favorite governors.  I like him not for political reasons (though his are pretty good), but because he's the single most depressed puppy on the planet.  It's like having that sad dog from Looney Tunes (Droopy Dog?) as your governor.  When Mason and I went to see him announce the passing of marriage equality, he gave a short speech that was like this: murmuring in a kind of wet blanket voice.... any pause at all in monotone, and WILD cheering and squeeing from fabulous gay people... more monotone.... At that moment, I thought, "I love you, Governor Dayton.  For so many reasons." Plus, he's actually been upfront about the fact that he does/or has, in point of fact, suffered from depression.  He also adopted a puppy at one point and when we drive past the Governor's mansion on the way to Shawn's work every day, I always look for the sign that says "SLOW DOG AT PLAY."  Which is, of course, meant to be read, "Slow.  Dog at play."  And it is, in point of fact, interrupted with a picture of a dog, but it has no official punctuation, so I've started waving to the mansion and saying, "Good morning, Slow Dog."

Right, okay, it's probably time to brew another pot of coffee and hunker down under cats and blankets.

This Year I'm Resolved to...

I've decided that rather than say I'm making New Year Resolutions (because we all know what happens to THOSE), I'm going to simply try to be resolved to do certain things.

On the very top of my list is the toughest one. In 2014, I'm resolved to get over this writerly slump of mine and stop wallowing in self-pity.  I'm an extremely self-indulgent person, and I've allowed myself to feel really badly about my writing career's latest bump for a long, long time.  Yeah, it sucks that Penguin dropped me after Precinct 13, but publishers dump people all the time.  I may not recover from this, but what else is there to do, but try?  I let some opportunities slip by me in 2013 and I can't do that any more.

To that end, due in large part to the support of empty_mirrors , I have a seekrit project that I'll reveal at some point.  Fingers crossed, but I think I may have finally found a way to combine the things I love about fan writing with original writing THAT WILL STICK.

The other thing I'm going to try to do this year is be a better pen pal.  Three years ago (or longer?), I put out a call on Facebook to see if anyone wanted to receive old-timey correspondence from me.... letters, delivered by post. (I know, right?  Who's even heard of this??) I got a couple of bites and I had a lot of fun writing actual pen and paper letters to people.  I'm going to try doing that again.  I just wrote a letter to my former/kind-of-slacked-off-on-my-end pen pal in Seattle, and I'm going to try to write something to her every couple of weeks--even if I don't get a response.  And, Frank, if you read this, this means you too! But no pressure to write back--I really just enjoy the feeling of pen in hand and it's nice to have an excuse to use fancy papers and buy pretty cards.

Those are the big ones.  If I happen to exercise more and lose weight or become a better partner and do the dishes more often and keep up with my blogs along the way, that'd be swell... but you know, baby-steps.

The Dreaded Fruit Cake

Okay, so I've eaten some weird things for this blog-- natto and Marmite-- but now I'm going to try possibly one of the strangest foods in all of creation: fruit cake.



It looks innocent enough.  However, it's very, very dense and there are candied 'so-called' fruits embedded in it.





As you can see, I'm highly unsure about this experience.  The texture could best be described as gooey.  The flavoring was strangely overwhelmingly... clove?  Not a favorite of mine on its own. Yes with nutmeg and cinnamon and the other pumpkin pie spices.

My overall impression:



In the infamous words of "Tard, the Grumpy Cat": NOPE.

Rosettes

It's the day before the day before Christmas, so we made rosettes.  If you've never had a rosette, here's what Wikipedia says about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosette_(cookie).  Even though these are Norwegian, my Polish grandma made them to (or bought them somewhere, but I'm guessing made.)  I have fond memories of these crispy, sugar coated cookies.

Since I love my photo montages, here's one of that process: