C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 40

easter holidays

Indy’s on Easter holidays, which is 2 weeks off, and I’ve basically been convinced it’s the weekend since the 8th of April.

Strangely enough, it has not been the weekend since the 8th of April, which has led to some deep confusion on my part. I suppose I’ll get back in the swing of things when school starts up again, but this bodes ill for my brain over summer vacation.

We went down to Fota Island for a day, and I took some pictures.

Indy was thrilled beyond comprehension to see REAL! CHEETAH...

a night with the girls

I did not mean for that last post about the big break to be the last post for two weeks, but I temporarily forgot my password and couldn’t log in. Heh. :)

I defied my cold (and probably common sense) and went out to dinner with friends last night. I managed to be late because I stopped to do my makeup and missed the train, so I was pretty annoyed with myself. OTOH, it did provide the pretty amusing moments where, as I approached the table, one of the two women facing me looked straight at me...

the big break

All right, this is it, the big break.

Livejournal has updated its user terms and conditions with an expectation of complying with Russian (I almost typed Soviet, oi) law, including their anti-LGBTQ and freedom of speech laws, which is more than the camel can bear. It’s not like LJ’s had a lot of activity the past, uh, well, several, years, but many of us who have been holding out…no longer are.

I’ll be here on mizkit.com, of course, but I’ll be crossposting this journal to mizkit.dreamwidth.o...

Let me tell you about growing up in Alaska.

I grew up in a small town in Alaska. It was on the road system, which meant we could and did drive to Anchorage once a year, maybe twice, but my town didn’t have, say, a McDonald’s, when I was a kid. I remember when the Dairy Queen opened, and the Arby’s, which was less of a big deal because it opened after DQ, but the first time I went to McDonald’s I was around 11 and I froze. I had no idea what to order. I hardly had any idea *how* to order, even though I’d gone to DQ and Arby’s. But that...

Picoreview: Ghost in the Shell

Picoreview: Ghost in the Shell: I think it’s probably the kind if thing you’re going to like if you’re going to like it and the kind of thing you’re not going to like if you’re not going to like it.

I apparently decided the hill to die on was “female-led films need to do well at the box office” rather than “whitewashing is evil” and went to see it last night. Having only seen the anime once, and not having particularly cared for it and remembering almost nothing about it except a handful of i...

gorilla dreams

I wondered aloud the other day if I were to consistently get enough sleep, whether I would still be tired all the time. I recall an experiment in this field a couple of years ago, where for about two weeks I made a real effort to go to bed early and get enough sleep. After a couple weeks I felt so great I…stopped…

Anyway, after a very busy day yesterday I slept 11.5 hours* and this morning had a lot of weird dreams, the highlight of which was about a troop of gorillas living along the creek b...

international consortium of Getting Stuff Done

Nearly 8 years ago now I started the ‘war room’, a chat room for writers to log into and keep each other company while we write. It’s a combination of support group, inertia-breaker, guilt-inducer, and social space. People log in from all over North America and Europe (I don’t think we have any other continents checking in), and it works really well. (Michelle Sagara dedicated the latest Elantra book to us. ♥ :))

I wish I could figure out a way to make something similiar for more off-line act...

Kitsnacks: Cocoa Brownies

This is our family’s go-to brownie recipe:

Cocoa Brownies
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c flour
1/3 c cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, room temp or softer
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Whisk the dry ingredients together. Add butter, eggs and vanilla and mix. Scrape into a 9×9″ buttered pan. Bake at 350°F for 15-18 minutes, until barely done (a fork inserted in the centre should come out slightly gooey but not *wet*). Allow to cool. Frost as desired. (I usually use chocolate buttercream frosting.) Eat! Make...

new hair!

My hair has been driving me increasingly crazy. I challenged myself to grow it for…three years, or something. Around the time Indy was born, until my 40th birthday. And I’m now a few months shy of my 44th and had kept it long, but all I ever do with it is pull it into a ponytail, or sometimes braid it, and eventually get the ends that are wrecked from ponytail holders trimmed off. And it’s just been driving me nuts. Not the weight, but the presence. The bits sliding into my face. All of it. J...

spring cleaning, i guess

I read an article the other day that said the average American household has 300,000 items in it and now I want to get rid of everything we own. :p

I mean, this isn’t really like a sudden new urge. I’ve been suffering from the Tyranny Of Things for a while now, and I keep grimly trying to do something about it. It doesn’t seem to get anywhere. More books appear. More RANDOM PIECES OF PAPER appear. I hang on to clothes in the hope that I’ll get slim enough for them or the fear I’ll get fat eno...