Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

So if you decide to use large tomatoes instead of ramekins or dinner rolls as implements for holding raw eggs to bake them in a moderate oven, it'll work just fine, but the acidity of the tomato will interact with the egg and increase the needed baking time to about 40, 45 minutes for a moderately firm yolk. I salted the inside of the tomato lightly and lined it heavily with basil before cracking the egg into it, and then I stuck a thin slice of baguette over top and put a little cheese on that. I'll use more specifically chosen bread (likely Swedish rye) and cheese next time, but I didn't want to go to the store for this experiment, so I used the bit ends of what we had, and it turned out fine once we figured out about the acidity. Pretty tasty, worth remembering.

And now you know, and knowing is, if not half the battle, at least some appreciable fraction.

The book I'm reading right now seems to think that the rest is breeding the right horses, but since it's regarding 1812, I'm not sure it's universally applicable.

I was not sure whether to begin this post:

Woe, woe, gloom, despair! We will all catch tuberculosis in the workhouse and be buried in pauper's graves, woe!

or perhaps:

We have now completed the Scandosotan Stereotype Checklist and are perfect caricatures of ourselves.

but I think I will just go with the classic:

I bought a car. It is blue.

We are not only the proud owners of a used Volvo, but the first CD in its CD player was the Indigo Girls. Yah. Yah. That is just how much of a demographic we are.

I am doing revisions on a printout, because I need to revise on printouts mostly, and when I try not to, I bang my head repeatedly against the wall and then feel stupid when it turns out all I needed was a printout. So. Printout! I need to remind myself of this in future, because I am unlikely to come admit to you-all that revisions have stalled out and give you the chance to remind me that I need a printout.

Anyway: I am doing these revisions with the purple pen of mystery. It's the oddest thing. (Where by "the oddest thing," I mean "a fairly ordinary household object.") It's a disposable fountain pen. There is absolutely no way to refill this fountain pen. It's nice, though. It's a pilot, and I wouldn't say the nib is any worse in smoothness than my refillable Pilot fountain pens, though it's lighter. I found this pen cleaning out a box of things that got stuck on the corner of the hearth when we moved in and stayed there. And yet the ink has not dried out and the nib isn't clogging. It is a good little pen.

The thing is, we cannot figure out where this pen came from. Mark doesn't use fountain pens. Timprov and I know all of our fountain pens personally and have no recollection of this pen ever joining their number. And we can't think who would have left this pen with us. Most of our guests are definitively non-users of fountain pens or else Dave obsessive enough about their fountain pens to know what kind they use and keep track of where they've gone.

It's too bad, too, because after five years I would not offer to give this pen back, at least not until after I'd finished revising this book with it, but I would want to know where the heck they got such a thing, and where I could get another, or ideally a whole pack of them. Wait! I know! The magic of the internets has told me where to get more. Well, all right then. It is a Pilot Varsity. If this might be your pen left at my house for five years, I'm dreadfully sorry, but at least I know replacements are only $3.25, so you won't be too bereft. And neither will I when the thing runs out.

1. I no longer like milk chocolate. I am still willing to eat a frozen Reese's Peanut Butter Cup once in a blue moon, but that may be it. I still have to try a Marabou hazelnut milk chocolate bar to be sure. But when we were in the Toronto airport, I spotted the lovely Quality Street packages and bought some. I enjoyed them two years ago. I loved them two years ago. I ate one and thought it tasted funny, so I thought maybe I was coming down with something. Waited a few weeks. Tried another two pieces for lunch today, different flavors: um. No. Not at all, in fact. There was clearly nothing wrong with them. They were just...milk chocolate. Which I don't like now. At all, apparently. I mean, it's not spit-it-out gross to me, but...it turns out I'd really rather not.

I had some inkling of this when I was in the car dealership waiting for several hours and they had a vending machine. I thought, "I will get myself a treat!" And I looked, and they didn't have anything I would classify as a treat. It all looked like it would be a chore to eat, and that's no good on any axis, so I didn't get anything. And I thought I was just being a snob about mass-market American chocolate, because I have been known to be a snob from time to time, you will be shocked to hear. But then this with the Quality Street, which, okay, is still mass-market. It is not the finest milk chocolate British chocolatiers have ever produced. But it was awfully good just two years ago, and I don't think Nestle is what's changed. I think it's me.

So I have two tiny bars of Green & Black 70% for in the airport and/or on the plane next week. Just In Case. What if there's a storm? Who'd want to be stuck on the tarmac in Detroit without chocolate? Uff da, what a thought. (I will also have my own homemade mix of dried fruit and nuts. Hypoglycemics travel prepared. Hypoglycemic snobs, doubly so.)

2. I am the Death of Plants. The Death of Rats says, "SQUEAK." I don't know what I say. "C55H72O5N4Mg," probably. (The subscripts are all elevated to the same line, making it the equivalent of all-caps for a chemical formula, right?) One of the people I love most in the world gave me a living stick for my birthday. It is now a formerly-living stick. I misted it with the laundry bottle! I misted and misted! But it is crunchy. I am no expert on plants (which is surprising, given that I am their Death, but there you go), but I am given to understand that crunchy is generally bad. This makes me oh-for-three for the year when it comes to plants. Naming them doesn't help: I killed a pothos called Porthos. Not naming them doesn't help. Nothing seems to help. I am just the Death of Plants.

Crud.

3. We don't have the material for new kitchen curtains. I looked at everything they had, and I wanted none of it. We do, however, have books, because I went into the used bookstore next door and salved my feelings about the whole curtain business with a biography of King Christina and a book about the exploration of Australia and, oh, several other things. As the leaves fall, my back-door neighbors will be able to see directly into the kitchen when I sit at the kitchen table and drink hot chocolate and read my books. I suspect that the world will keep turning. (But I will go look for fabric further afield after I get back from World Fantasy anyway.)

4. I also do not have Ha'penny, nor my Mammals CD (not featuring elisem: different Mammals), nor my Kurlansky book, nor timprov's Dar Williams Live DVD, nor yet my Veronica Mars Season 3 DVDs. And yet I have not run down to the mailbox to collar the mailbeing and demand them. Because I am a mature and reasonable individual, and also because I didn't see when the mail came yesterday.

5. I have now written more short stories than I've sold this year. Although no one should feel constrained from tipping the balance back again. I was saying elsewhere, in response to a locked post, that periodically I feel the need to "clear the decks" of short story ideas so that I have fewer half-finished short stories wandering around my brain. This process is always good for me, but never in the intended way: writing all those short stories gets me thinking about Things, and those Things get me thinking about more Things, and pretty soon I have a bunch more short stories started. This is as though putting away groceries made you think of food and go have to write half a dozen more things on the grocery list so you can make them later.

Wait. I do that, too. So it's an ongoing theme in my life, is what we're saying here.

And the one serious thing: Someone in my close extended family (if that term makes sense: close to me personally but not by legal reckoning) has fallen and broken her hip. (Probably the reverse order, given how these things tend to happen with elderly bones.) She's in a lot of pain, and a previous medical problem means that she's not entirely mentally clear on the world around her any more. So pain and confusion. We're hoping the doctors can keep her comfortable while they fix the hip, but if I seem preoccupied, that may well be why. I'm perfectly willing to talk about more details on e-mail with those of you who have reason to want them (those who know my extended family members, for example), but when I'm not clear on where someone wants privacy, I don't want to name her publicly. Still, she's in my thoughts.

Briefly, on my way out to the airport --

Yes, I know some messages are bouncing to my regular mail. Please re-send them (some of the bounced ones have gotten back through) or send them to my gmail. Thanks so much.

You know what silly thing I'm really no good at? (Okay, this is your time to listen inquisitively, rather than starting the list for me.) I seem to be physically unable to get rid of perishables without getting rid of less-perishables at an equal or greater rate. Olive oil. Plastic bags. Champagne mustard. These things would not go bad while we're gone next week! They could have awaited our return with the patience inherent to condiments and kitchen accoutrements! Yet we still have an entire red bell pepper in the veggie bin after tonight's broccoli diablo, and we did not manage to consume the entire population of kiwi fruits in the fruit bin. I fear that the process of using up those things will require us to run out of rice flour, almond extract, rubber bands, and brillo pads.

But I am patient. I will persevere, and I will triumph over the perishables. The lettuce will fall! The eggs will quiver before my wrath! Or something like, anyway.

I suspect that part of the problem is that it was *shudder* springlike here today, and just as fall brings about the urge to squirrel away food in the freezer and the pantry, spring brings the urge to clean them out! But tomorrow I will counter that urge by putting banana bread in the freezer instead of removing something. After all, it'll use up three bananas and two eggs, and that counts for a good deal.

I hate the telephone. Hate. Haaaaaate. But I have finished two phone chores, leaving two more for the week, unless something comes up. I am mighty. I am fierce. Etc. I should probably go dig up the documentation I need to make those other two phone calls right now, and then I can feel virtuous and, more importantly, liberated from the phone for the rest of the week. The basement is cold. Perhaps if I get tea after digging. Hmm. Perhaps if I promise myself more of the monkey chapter after. The monkey chapter is creepier than I expected. I never expect to be creepy. I think of my own brain as a sunlit meadow. It is apparently a very creepy sunlit meadow sometimes. Other people seem to have noticed this on the order of...um...well, it's looking like eight years ago now, I guess, when the college lit mag published one of my stories.* The self-image, it sometimes takes a good while to catch up. I think it's partly that I'm one of the least depressive people I know, so I sort of think of myself as skipping around singing tra-la in comparison to the rest of you lot. And I forget to account for much of my social group being...writers.

In unrelated news, if there is some chance that you will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in late February or early March, please e-mail me. (Some of you should already have these e-mails. Others of you -- I have either misplaced your e-mail or (mentally) misplaced you, as in, placed you somewhere else. For irrelevant example, I have to remind myself every time I read callunav and juliansinger's posts that they are at least one city farther north than I always think they are, sometimes two. So: Bay Area. Help.)

*I wrote it in a fit of pique at my fiction studio prof. He loved it. My fits of pique are often ineffective in this way. "Take that -- I'll write you a story!" "Oh, cool!" "*sigh*"

I strongly suspect that the apricot preserves I put in my brother-in-law-in-law's crockpot apricot chicken recipe were The Wrong Kind, because I am not at all sure we have something salvageable here. We will try again later with a different kind of apricot preserves, but not tonight, for heaven's sake not tonight. This is why they have these cunning little shops that manufacture pizzas to suit.

I know entropy wins every day. But today is a day that feels more like entropy is winning. Even though much of my desk is cleaner than it was 24 hours ago. Rooms dusted! Thank-you cards written! Story notes sorted! Magazines filed or bagged to send away! Buttons sewn on! And when I sew a button on, it stays sewn on. Unfortunately, often this means that a good yank such as a casual person might do to their trousers casually will shatter the button rather than merely pulling it loose. But never mind that. I have done my part with the sewing and can do no more.

And still the entropic feelings. Bah, entropy. I think it's because of the door thing falling off my desk. Did you know they used to springload typewriters in these things? True story. lydy explained it to me. (...so it must be true, right?) The light is bad in this corner, but I do need to get in there and Make It Go, or determine that it won't and figure out what to do from there. This was my grandfather's desk. I love having my grandfather's desk. I also love having a functional desk. So there you have that.

Or it might be the malfunctioning post office machines, or it might be the lack of humidifier parts at our Home Despot, or it might be sheer perversity on the part of my brain (never to be underestimated). I don't know. Anyway, I am going to try to wrestle the feelings of entropy into submission by writing some more of "The Snow Queen and Milady de Winter." It's not the winning, it's the trying, and all that.

How are you wrestling entropy? Who's winning?

timprov and I were supposed to go to the zoo today with ladysea and her mostly-shrimpy entourage. And in fact it looks like we will be doing exactly that, but not under our own power: the car wouldn't start. It started just fine when I went to get us Panera sandwiches to take with for lunch and dropped off library books. Then we got in to go to the zoo, a few minutes early. It makes an unhappy noise and then does not start.

Sigh.

So. ladysea will be picking us up, and we will be taking the car in or having someone else come and fetch it. And really it's been a good car with no problems for so long that I could hardly be annoyed with the car, in fairness. Still: makes one glad one didn't commit to pay for the hugely overpriced basement-renovation job.