Rin Sparrow's Blog, page 2

Possibly the Best Day Ever!

I'm sooo sleepy right now and really should get in bed soon - especially considering I will likely try to finish The Lord of White Hell before I actually sleep! - but just had to post because today was *awesome*!  Chilled with a good friend of mine I had met while in Japan (she's American and was also a JET). It was actually sunny and *warm* for one - so rare for the Bay area!  We started the day by splurging on lunch at an awesome French restaurant, which my friend treated me to cause she's awesome too! Then happened to go by a pastry shop that sells Parisian macaroons - pretty much my favorite dessert ever! They had amazing flavors, like salted caramel and yuzu (a kind of citrus fruit from Japan) and were sooo tasty! If you've never had Parisian macaroons, google them, find the nearest place to you that has them, and go! When made well they are the best things ever! And they aren't something you can just whip up yourself, like cupcakes are. The recipe for them is deceptively simple, but making them well is practically an art form. (Probably one of the many reasons they became popular in Japan!)
Of course, that would've made a lovely day right there, but then we decided to put the top down on the car and bask in some sunny-ness! The car isn't even mine actually! lol. A friend of mine is at Cannes and let me and the hubby have his mustang convertible while he's gone. So it was perfect timing! We decided to head to a sorbet place that's usually kind of out of the way for us normally - Scream Sorbet! This place is *insanely* good. If you're ever in the Bay area, look them up. They sell their stuff at a bunch of weekly farmers markets all over the city, so you don't always have to make the trek out to the east bay to get it - although it's totally worth it! They use some sort of special machine that makes the sorbet incredibly smooth and they get all the ingredients from local farms. Plus, the flavors literally change *every* day so the variety is crazy! Basic flavors like pistachio rival gelati straight from Italy, and others are just awesome for their uniqueness - like Beet Lemon, Rose Vanilla, Almond Pink Peppercorn, Citrus Fennel, etc! And there's no dairy, so mu lactose-intolerant hubby can eat all he wants! haha.

Ok, so enough of plugging Scream, hehe. (Can't help it! It's so good!)  It was good food and good company and good weather, so what more could you ask for? Well, maybe some boys feeding eat other the sorbet...! Perhaps another day! XD

Monday, Monday

Had a nice weekend - finally got to see some the big run through San Fran called 'Bay to Breakers'! Lots of awesome, sparkly, ridiculous costumes! It's been great to hang with my friend Em - and now another friend I met while teaching in Japan (also American) is coming into town today! It'll be a full house, but it'll be so good to all be together again!  I just wish all the visits wouldn't put me behind with work for the site. O.o  The ebooks conversions are still coming along, but I never seem to have as much time to write as I would like. Seems like years now that I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll actually be able to get into a routine! Heh. Such is life!

I do have an awesome new novel to calm my nerves when things get too hectic though - a new one by Ginn Hale called The Lord of White Hell. I'm already have way through it! haha. Yay for yaoi!

Monday, Monday

Had a nice weekend - finally got to see some the big run through San Fran called 'Bay to Breakers'! Lots of awesome, sparkly, ridiculous costumes! It's been great to hang with my friend Em - and now another friend I met while teaching in Japan (also American) is coming into town today! It'll be a full house, but it'll be so good to all be together again!  I just wish all the visits wouldn't put me behind with work for the site. O.o  The ebooks conversions are still coming along, but I never seem to have as much time to write as I would like. Seems like years now that I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll actually be able to get into a routine! Heh. Such is life!

I do have an awesome new novel to calm my nerves when things get too hectic though - a new one by Ginn Hale called The Lord of White Hell. I'm already have way through it! haha. Yay for yaoi!

News and Blues

Looks like yet another company is censoring yaoi. Kindle recently pulled a bunch of yaoi manga. Boo! X(  I don't read manga much digitally thankfully, but its so frustrating nonetheless!

As for other news, I'm still working through getting the next ebook ready. I have a couple people helping me figure out how to convert to .pdf and ePub. Once I get it down I'm sure things will move quicker, but for now it's like moving through molasses! Without the help I'd be in a total stalemate though! So I'm very thankful for everyone who's lending their time.

The new ebook anthology 'Quickies' will include several of the vignettes from the site - all freshly polished and edited! And proceeds from it will go to Japn relief efforts as planned. The other fundraising efforts I had to set aside for the past month since so much was happening with my family. Now that I'm bad in Cali I was hoping to really dive back in again, but things are still so busy! A friend of mine arrives tomorrow to run Bay to Breakers (an awesome marathon through San Francisco). When she leaves the hubby and I will be prepping to head back to Chicago, for moms second memorial service (she lived there most of her life before moving to AZ last year). And once we get back from that we'll be looking for a house in the city to share with a couple friends and moving - yes, again!
So as you can see, things are still more busy than I'd like, and I'm doing my best to balance editing, writing, site improvement, ebooks, and now the fundraising efforts. So I hope everyone will be patient with me!

On the bright side, it's awesome to have my hubby back in Cali and I'm soooo excited to be moving to the city this summer! I've never lived right in the midst of a city before, and SF is my favorite! :D And there's some fun travel plans coming up in the fall as well, so I really can't complain!

Oh, if I forgot to mention it in the last post - I now have an Facebook page! It's under 'Rin Sparrow'. There's also a page for yaoifix on FB as well and a Twitter account under 'yaoifix' as well!  I'm not sure how I will keep up all the accounts! haha. We'll see. But at least anyone can get more news on YF outside the forum and main site - and I even have pics up from my time in Japan on the FB page. ;)

K, really need to eat breakfast now - it's noon! haha.

News and Blues

Looks like yet another company is censoring yaoi. Kindle recently pulled a bunch of yaoi manga. Boo! X(  I don't read manga much digitally thankfully, but its so frustrating nonetheless!

As for other news, I'm still working through getting the next ebook ready. I have a couple people helping me figure out how to convert to .pdf and ePub. Once I get it down I'm sure things will move quicker, but for now it's like moving through molasses! Without the help I'd be in a total stalemate though! So I'm very thankful for everyone who's lending their time.

The new ebook anthology 'Quickies' will include several of the vignettes from the site - all freshly polished and edited! And proceeds from it will go to Japn relief efforts as planned. The other fundraising efforts I had to set aside for the past month since so much was happening with my family. Now that I'm bad in Cali I was hoping to really dive back in again, but things are still so busy! A friend of mine arrives tomorrow to run Bay to Breakers (an awesome marathon through San Francisco). When she leaves the hubby and I will be prepping to head back to Chicago, for moms second memorial service (she lived there most of her life before moving to AZ last year). And once we get back from that we'll be looking for a house in the city to share with a couple friends and moving - yes, again!
So as you can see, things are still more busy than I'd like, and I'm doing my best to balance editing, writing, site improvement, ebooks, and now the fundraising efforts. So I hope everyone will be patient with me!

On the bright side, it's awesome to have my hubby back in Cali and I'm soooo excited to be moving to the city this summer! I've never lived right in the midst of a city before, and SF is my favorite! :D And there's some fun travel plans coming up in the fall as well, so I really can't complain!

Oh, if I forgot to mention it in the last post - I now have an Facebook page! It's under 'Rin Sparrow'. There's also a page for yaoifix on FB as well and a Twitter account under 'yaoifix' as well!  I'm not sure how I will keep up all the accounts! haha. We'll see. But at least anyone can get more news on YF outside the forum and main site - and I even have pics up from my time in Japan on the FB page. ;)

K, really need to eat breakfast now - it's noon! haha.

The Germans are leaving!

Ok, just one German in particular! My friend and my temporary roomie for the past couple months is leaving today to head back to Frankfurt. So sad! She's a visiting PhD student, who I met through *another* visiting PhD student from Manchester, Beth (who was a friend of a friend the hubby and I met while in Europe a couple years ago). They both loved it here in the Bay area and so wanted to stay longer, but it was fun while it lasted - and I think they are already making plans to return!

It was really such a blessing to have them around too. When Beth came last fall, she couldn't find an apartment, and since it was right around the time the hubby started caring for his mom out in AZ, it worked out that she came to live with us. Then she left in Jan. and not long after the V (as we call our German friend, since her name is hard to pronounce!) decided she wanted out of her current living arrangements (who were loud college students, and didn't seem to care when the house had a *rat* problem, yuck!) and decided to take the room Beth had vacated.

I don't know what I would've done without them, with so much going on and the hubby gone pretty much 3 weeks out of the month. We had only moved to the Bay area ourselves a year ago and don't know that many people - plus  I work at home on the site, so it wasn't like I had co-workers to be social with. So to have someone else in the house around eat with, hang with, and to help support me when I was trying so hard to support my husband was such a wonderful blessing! And when I was gone to AZ myself, they were able to cat-sit too! Which just make things so much easier!

The timing worked out crazy as well - the hubby and I just got back (permanently) to the Bay a few days ago, so with the V leaving, I won't be left alone, and the hubby can have his room back! But I'm still so sad to she the V go. On the bright side, we'll get to visit her on our next Europe trip in late summer, and then she'll be visiting here again next fall! So there's still something to look forward to. :)

The Germans are leaving!

Ok, just one German in particular! My friend and my temporary roomie for the past couple months is leaving today to head back to Frankfurt. So sad! She's a visiting PhD student, who I met through *another* visiting PhD student from Manchester, Beth (who was a friend of a friend the hubby and I met while in Europe a couple years ago). They both loved it here in the Bay area and so wanted to stay longer, but it was fun while it lasted - and I think they are already making plans to return!

It was really such a blessing to have them around too. When Beth came last fall, she couldn't find an apartment, and since it was right around the time the hubby started caring for his mom out in AZ, it worked out that she came to live with us. Then she left in Jan. and not long after the V (as we call our German friend, since her name is hard to pronounce!) decided she wanted out of her current living arrangements (who were loud college students, and didn't seem to care when the house had a *rat* problem, yuck!) and decided to take the room Beth had vacated.

I don't know what I would've done without them, with so much going on and the hubby gone pretty much 3 weeks out of the month. We had only moved to the Bay area ourselves a year ago and don't know that many people - plus  I work at home on the site, so it wasn't like I had co-workers to be social with. So to have someone else in the house around eat with, hang with, and to help support me when I was trying so hard to support my husband was such a wonderful blessing! And when I was gone to AZ myself, they were able to cat-sit too! Which just make things so much easier!

The timing worked out crazy as well - the hubby and I just got back (permanently) to the Bay a few days ago, so with the V leaving, I won't be left alone, and the hubby can have his room back! But I'm still so sad to she the V go. On the bright side, we'll get to visit her on our next Europe trip in late summer, and then she'll be visiting here again next fall! So there's still something to look forward to. :)

Life Gets in the Way

So, many of you may have noticed that there's been a big gap since I've updated, and that I haven't had time to do the fundraisers, etc yet. For a long time I've debated about how much to to post of my life on here, which has led me to just drop off from posting at all... so I'm going to just lay it all out there, and hopefully that will get me to post more often.

Let me fill you all in on what's been happening. A while ago I posted that my mother-in-law was ill. The past month or so, her condition went drastically downhill, and two weeks ago she passed away. My husband was one of her main caregivers, but he's handling it well. We all knew it would end this way, and she passed peacefully, so we couldn't ask for more than that.

Now we're finally back in California, ready to finally get grounded here, after leaving Japan two years ago, and hopping around unsettled since then. It's been a really trying time, and we probably won't feel really settled for a few months yet. We have plans to travel to a memorial for my mother-in-law next month, then we'll be moving again, then we have more big travel plans for Europe to visit friends who were married last year. Sounds exciting in a way, but it's pretty tiring, and I'm really looking forward to a time when I can actually get some art done and get ahead on things with yaoifix.

So that's my ramble of what's going on. Don't know if anyone's really interested, but I'm going to do my best to post here regularly, even if it's just whatever about my daily life, what I'm working on for the site, etc.

Thanks,
rin

Life Gets in the Way

So, many of you may have noticed that there's been a big gap since I've updated, and that I haven't had time to do the fundraisers, etc yet. For a long time I've debated about how much to to post of my life on here, which has led me to just drop off from posting at all... so I'm going to just lay it all out there, and hopefully that will get me to post more often.

Let me fill you all in on what's been happening. A while ago I posted that my mother-in-law was ill. The past month or so, her condition went drastically downhill, and two weeks ago she passed away. My husband was one of her main caregivers, but he's handling it well. We all knew it would end this way, and she passed peacefully, so we couldn't ask for more than that.

Now we're finally back in California, ready to finally get grounded here, after leaving Japan two years ago, and hopping around unsettled since then. It's been a really trying time, and we probably won't feel really settled for a few months yet. We have plans to travel to a memorial for my mother-in-law next month, then we'll be moving again, then we have more big travel plans for Europe to visit friends who were married last year. Sounds exciting in a way, but it's pretty tiring, and I'm really looking forward to a time when I can actually get some art done and get ahead on things with yaoifix.

So that's my ramble of what's going on. Don't know if anyone's really interested, but I'm going to do my best to post here regularly, even if it's just whatever about my daily life, what I'm working on for the site, etc.

Thanks,
rin

Fundraising for Japan!

Hi! This is just an notice that I'll be auctioning art from Yaoifix.com to raise money for the relief efforts in Japan!  The auction will begin next month, in the first week of April (since unfortunately I'm out of town until then).

I'll have finished as well as concept art available from stories such as Boys of Dorm D, Star-Crossed, Stolen Away, etc.!  So if there's a particular character sketch your little heart desires, best let me know now so I can go through my old sketchbooks and get it ready for auction!

All art will be signed and come with extra goodies! ;)

If anyone has questions, let me know!

Rin ^_~