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thanateToday is fired (after falling asleep over a story I was trying to revise, and several needlessly complicated run arounds with various financial websites, etc.) but once I gave up on trying to be productive a little bit of useful stuff actually happened. Here are some things I haven't managed to mention yet:
*It has reached that point of the year where not only do I wake up at 5:30 am because it is light out and lie there grumbling about being awake, but it has apparently become necessary to wake up several times in the night to see if it's 5:30 yet. Fortunately, it's only another week and a half until Sun-go-away.
*I have signed up for the Clarion West write-a-thon, partly because I like having external writing goals, and partly because they were going for 200 participants to get a fundraising pledge. No one should feel the least bit obliged to "sponsor" me, but if you want to support up and coming F&SF writers, don't let me stop you. There may be more frequent writing updates once it gets going. (Incidentally, you are unlikely to see more of the story I used as my excerpt, since the narrator turned into a whiny 16-year-old and I lost interest in writing about her. Is that mean?)
*Baby starlings are ridiculous. I sincerely hope that any children I have will not be following me around yelling "Food! Food!" constantly by the time they're as big as I am. Unfortunately, starling parents cannot distract their offspring with books.
*Once upon a time, in the dim dark ages when I was busy wasting my time working at Office Depot over the summer instead of looking into cool college-ish things I could have been doing (like investigating writing workshops more to my taste than the awful creative writing department at Oberlin) I was once called upon by the latino assistant manager to explain to some co-worker that Taco Bell was not Mexican food. I'm pretty sure I said, "It's *americanized* mexican," which seemed to resolve the dispute-- I might have gone on to compare MacDonalds to home-cooked burgers; I don't recall. In any case, I have no idea why the discontented college kid at the register seemed like a good person to appeal to, but I was reminded of the conversation a while back by some reference to "authentic" cooking. Things that come out of my kitchen are almost always authentically food, but I will cheerfully play with everything from stir fry to ancient Mediterranean flavors. So long as it doesn't involve onions, or seafood, or other things that I'm not convinced are actually food, that is.
*We survived round 1 of family reunioning this past weekend (my mother's family) and got my grandmother to talk a bit about various family history. I had forgotten the story about how her grandfather Mortimer's uncle got terribly jealous b/c he (Mortimer) was doing so well that he (the uncle) set fire to their house in the middle of the night. He didn't want to kill them, so he knocked on the windows & woke up Mortimer, his pregnant wife, and their infant daughter, but then they had to walk over to his (M's) parents house in their night clothes. Also, they'd just lost two older daughters (aged 4 & 2-or-so) to probably-scarlet-fever, so not a good few months, all in all. (Some other relative, possibly on my grandfather's side, got run out of towns in KS not once but twice for being on the abolitionist side of the slavery debate, which also involved buildings being burnt down. Apparently there was a lot of that going on in the early pioneer days?)
*I have written up a list, a la that one in Neil Gaiman's commencement speech (that you've all listened to by now, right?) of things I should like to do in a writing/creative sense. It is not a "bucket list" as if it were, it would have to reside in a bucket, and I have enough trouble finding empty buckets around here when I want them already. But something to stick up on the wall of the loft or something to remember that I have other projects I'm not worrying about right now.
*And now, as I am still shockingly actually awake, perhaps I should get back to some of those things I was going to do this morning.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
*It has reached that point of the year where not only do I wake up at 5:30 am because it is light out and lie there grumbling about being awake, but it has apparently become necessary to wake up several times in the night to see if it's 5:30 yet. Fortunately, it's only another week and a half until Sun-go-away.
*I have signed up for the Clarion West write-a-thon, partly because I like having external writing goals, and partly because they were going for 200 participants to get a fundraising pledge. No one should feel the least bit obliged to "sponsor" me, but if you want to support up and coming F&SF writers, don't let me stop you. There may be more frequent writing updates once it gets going. (Incidentally, you are unlikely to see more of the story I used as my excerpt, since the narrator turned into a whiny 16-year-old and I lost interest in writing about her. Is that mean?)
*Baby starlings are ridiculous. I sincerely hope that any children I have will not be following me around yelling "Food! Food!" constantly by the time they're as big as I am. Unfortunately, starling parents cannot distract their offspring with books.
*Once upon a time, in the dim dark ages when I was busy wasting my time working at Office Depot over the summer instead of looking into cool college-ish things I could have been doing (like investigating writing workshops more to my taste than the awful creative writing department at Oberlin) I was once called upon by the latino assistant manager to explain to some co-worker that Taco Bell was not Mexican food. I'm pretty sure I said, "It's *americanized* mexican," which seemed to resolve the dispute-- I might have gone on to compare MacDonalds to home-cooked burgers; I don't recall. In any case, I have no idea why the discontented college kid at the register seemed like a good person to appeal to, but I was reminded of the conversation a while back by some reference to "authentic" cooking. Things that come out of my kitchen are almost always authentically food, but I will cheerfully play with everything from stir fry to ancient Mediterranean flavors. So long as it doesn't involve onions, or seafood, or other things that I'm not convinced are actually food, that is.
*We survived round 1 of family reunioning this past weekend (my mother's family) and got my grandmother to talk a bit about various family history. I had forgotten the story about how her grandfather Mortimer's uncle got terribly jealous b/c he (Mortimer) was doing so well that he (the uncle) set fire to their house in the middle of the night. He didn't want to kill them, so he knocked on the windows & woke up Mortimer, his pregnant wife, and their infant daughter, but then they had to walk over to his (M's) parents house in their night clothes. Also, they'd just lost two older daughters (aged 4 & 2-or-so) to probably-scarlet-fever, so not a good few months, all in all. (Some other relative, possibly on my grandfather's side, got run out of towns in KS not once but twice for being on the abolitionist side of the slavery debate, which also involved buildings being burnt down. Apparently there was a lot of that going on in the early pioneer days?)
*I have written up a list, a la that one in Neil Gaiman's commencement speech (that you've all listened to by now, right?) of things I should like to do in a writing/creative sense. It is not a "bucket list" as if it were, it would have to reside in a bucket, and I have enough trouble finding empty buckets around here when I want them already. But something to stick up on the wall of the loft or something to remember that I have other projects I'm not worrying about right now.
*And now, as I am still shockingly actually awake, perhaps I should get back to some of those things I was going to do this morning.
Xposty from dreamwidth.