Debbie Daughetee

I'm going to have a nephew! (Okay, to be fair, I inherited 3 nieces and 3 nephews when I married Mike, but they're all too old or too far away for me to warp them.) Everything baby-related is going well. (Nothing weird about him, says my brother. Except he's a boy, say I.) I'm happy for my brother.

I've spent today slushing for two different magazines and writing/answering e-mail. My goal is to get up at the same time Mike does every morning (except the weekends) so I don't end up switching my days and nights. And so I don't make Mike feel completely jealous.

The kitchen is finally finished. We can move the table back in and everything. I just need to paint a little bit, and we'll be ready for the hutch and the new-used couch & chair.

Oof. Family went out to celebrate Katie's birthday and the baby news, and I'm stuffed with catfish and wild boar and heirloom tomatoes and wild rice pudding. And coffee! Complain about lack of coffee, and it appears! (We'll see if sleep is as accommodating.)

Currently reading: Everything Bad Is Good For You, The Book of Lost Books
Currently listening: Madame Bovary

Oo! Look, you can get an anthology I’m in for cheap. Jason Sizemore, proprietor of Apex Books says:

For one week only, the following Apex Book Company titles are on sale for $10.00:

Unwelcome Bodies
The Next Fix
HebrewPunk
Aegri Somnia
Gratia Placenti
Orgy of Souls
Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales
Beauty & Dynamite

Make Alexander Hamilton proud. Spend ten bucks and buy a book!

Now, I do have to warn you, just in case you don’t know, that Gratia Placenti is horror. This is not safe for parents — and by that I mean my parents. But the rest of you, have at it. Here’s the teaser from my story, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”

The moment Tuyet walked into the Dagenais’s compartment, she knew something was different. The usual pack of dogs swarmed around her, distracting her, before she figured out that the compartment smelled different. Not bad–not like the times they had left everything piled in the sink for her as if they were having a contest to see who could goad the other into doing the dishes. Nor the time they’d fired the dog walker and didn’t bother to walk the hoard of dogs that Hélène kept. But they paid her to come once a week to wipe their counters, load the dishwasher and tidy the compartment. So she’d kept her head down, asked herself what Kant would have done, then said screw the philosophy and wiped up the dog shit and urine.

Kant would not have done that.

Comments? -- Link

Interesting essay on Salon. I stumbled across it via Jezebel, where there's a conversation going, as well (I'm actually enjoying the Jezebel discussion, which is touching on such glimmery niblets as the public perception of writers and artists, more than the original article). I probably would have missed it, otherwise, because I stopped reading Salon about a year ago. The quality of the articles had just bottomed out for me and the comment threads were unbearable.

This reminded me of a neat program called Food Not Bombs. There are at least 2 local chapters of FNB that I know of, one in Sacramento, and one in Davis. FNB is a volunteer group which serves a free vegetarian/vegan meal once a week in public parks. I love grass-rootsy projects like this.

Also, a lot of local shelters will accept fresh food donations. Good to know this time of year, when many home gardeners start to become inundated with more fruit and veggies than they can eat.

Update:

Wow! The Jezebel comments have gone kablooey! 361 comments as of 5 pm!

Considering the way cabbies drive in NYC, this is strangely appropriate:



"Get ready for a killer ride"

In other news, check out this Grindhouse-style trailer for The House of the Dead: Overkill, coming to a Wii near you (possibly NSFW). I hope they include the first HotD game in there as a bonus...

Toodle on over to Podcastle to hear K.D. Wentworth's story "Hallah Iron-Thighs and the Change of Life" read by ... ME! In my closet! On a very hot summer's day.

The story first appeared in Baen's "Chicks in Chainmail" anthology, and it's one helluva romp.

The rules were: pick a photo. LOLcat-caption it. Make me actually laugh (out loud, preferably). Win.

And the winner is...

Well, actually, we have three winners. One for each photo.

Photo #1: Ruth-without-an-LJ

[not the best LOLcat grammar, perhaps, but it really did make me snort tea)


Photo #2: wooddragon

(disHonorable mention to tezmiller, who had a similar idea)

Photo #3: egret17

(disHonorable mentions to isabeau and autojim)

Well-captioned, all of you!

Winners, send me your mailing address via e-mail and preferences for inscription -- and do it quick, or wait until September to have them mailed!

The entries have all been unscreened, if you care to browse.

Like, on one hand everything is lazy and summery and lovely and I could just lay in the grass all day. But on the other, gravity feels heavier than usual, and doing anything but laying in the grass seems to take way more effort than it should. But I am fighting back! In $10 sunglasses from my local, controversial flea market, no less.

Love,
Meghan

Playing catch-up -- why is it that I always fool myself into thinking I'm going to get a lot more work done while traveling than is actually possible? Oh well. Finished the last chapter in the 2nd Faerie Path book and delivered it to the TP editor on Monday. I practically wore the covers off of my copy of The Bard's English (thanks, Wayne! It was a lifesaver!).

So, back to work on the Marvel cards, and my project with Rachel. Wheee!!!

@_@

Can I has sleep now? No? Darn.

My pal mercuriodrivera's fantastic short story "Longing for Langalana" (Interzone #204, June 2006) is now available as a podcast at Transmissions From Beyond. Find out for yourself why "Langalana" received the most votes in Interzone's readers' poll for 2006 by listening to the story read by Heather Welliver, who really does justice to this examination of the chemical nature of love. (podcast length is 72 minutes)

It's sunny and lovely in northeast Florida but Tropical Storm Kay should be by tomorrow. deanna_hoak will experience it before we do. I'm not very worried but I will have to go batten down the carport and yard stuff in case of high winds. And maybe print out that 160 page Stargate fanfic that tabby333 sent me to -- wow. Very well done.



This is the front gate at NAS Key West, where I was stationed for 3 years, and which was probably the most fun of all my duty stations. Key West didn't suffer much damage at all and so I have hopes for the rest of Florida. (Btw, my story The Mountains of Key West is based not on my experiences there so much as the navy wives I knew)

In other news -- not much news! Writing continues. Zadie Smith has a piece in the latest issue of The Believer and it's a lovely bit about writing novels. I've got the latest Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales to read. And congrats to Nastia Luikin, Shawn Johnson and Jonathan Horton for more Olympic medals.

Combined Lizard-and-Mammal Brain woke me up at 5:30, insisting we had MORE TO WRITE! Well yes, we do. But it's not urgent right now, brain. We can sleep in.

NO! WRITE!

Damn it, brain...


Under the heading of cracktastic ideas I'm not going to write: an erotic were-bear story in which the were is an actual bear. leethomas? Consider that idea my birthday present to you. ;-) [EtA: if you don't get it, you're straight and/or sheltered; move along now..]

Meanwhile, I am trying to do three different things at once and not being remarkably effective at any of them, especially with brain still yammering on about WRITING! NOW! Must sit myself down and have a serious talk about where my multi-tasking skilz have gone...

(or maybe I'll just have some more coffee. And throw a little cocoa in it too, hrmm, yes. would you like that, brain?)


Also, today I must choose the winner of the LOLcatcontest! We had some damn good entries, so this may be tough... (you still have time to enter! I probably won't get to the actual judging until this afternoon...)

Another of my recipe-related gripes: people can't make proper sate sauce!

Hmmm - while I think of it both sides of my family are pretty international. I've talked about my mother and her South African relatives, but in my father's family, I have a couple of older relatives who spent their lives up to WWII in Indonesia.

When I was young, a great feature of my father's family gatherings were huge orgies of Indonesian food. Indonesian cooking became a bit of a fad in our family. We made almost everything ourselves from scratch, and Indonesian shop owners used to be most bewildered when this white person came in asking for some ingredient or rather, using the Indonesian word for whatever I was buying.

In any case. Sate sauce is of course the main ingedient of Gado gado, an Indonesian vegetable dish, and the sauce has been adopted by most other equatorial-Asian countries for sate. In its pure form, the sauce is poured over a bed of luke-warm lightly-cooked vegetables (cauliflower, white cabbage, bean sprouts, carrot, broccoli, with maybe some cooked chicken or tofu added, or boiled eggs). Remember: NO tomatoes in Indonesian food!

Indonesian peanut sauce:

1 onion
bit of oil
1 tbs brown sugar
1 tsp sambal ulek (chili paste. Don't add this if you plan to feed this to the kids)
2 tbs vinegar
half a jar of peanut butter (use cheap stuff! Chunks OK)
2 tbs sweet soy sauce (see note below)
half a cup of water

Cut onion and get everything ready on the bench.
Fry onion, sambal & brown sugar until onion is soft. Add vinegar. Add peanut butter and soy sauce. Here comes the trick: add a bit of water. Stir until thickened (careful: sauce usually slops over the side of the pan when you do this). Add more water, stir again, etc until the sauce has the desired consistency. If you need to turn it off and re-heat later, keep a bit of water handy to add when re-heating.

If you want to use this as sate sauce, marinate two chicken filets or equivalent (beef, pork, prawns, fish or tofu) in a mixture of 1 clove of garlic, 1 tbs of curry powder, 1 tbs of tomato sauce (ketchup) 2 tbs of sweet soy sauce, put on bamboo skewers and put in grill until cooked.

Note on soy sauce: The best soy sauce for Indonesian recipes is often the cheaper supermarket-brand stuff. Don't use Japanese or Chinese soy sauce. It's too salty and has a slightly rancid taste.

We go from Antarctica via Titan to Indonesia.

Duh.

Background reading.

Working on two novels and two short stories (or three or four?) at a time.

Novel #1: Hearts, the reason for my reading on Antarctica.
Novel #2: Ambassador, currently re-writing the first three chapters in first person and loving it
Story #1: unnamed. Something in my Union universe. Just doing the outline. It's about pilots. Not sure if this one will fly (pun intended - duh - aren't I being funny today)
Story #2: Chasing Nightingales, the source of my Indonesia reading. This is also the story that has clones, some space setting and Florence Nightingale. WTF? It's all pretty weird. Pretty much in development.

A reviewer on Luminescence questioned the presence of desert on Titan. I dunno. I look at the pictures, and that's pretty much what it looks like to me. Yellow sand with rocks = desert. I suppose it's debatable whether it's hard or soft. Not sure if anyone can answer that question until something has landed over there and picked up a piece. I am more or less presuming that in the absence of liquid surface water, the whatever-the-surface-is-composed-of is pretty dusty, especially since Titan has an atmosphere and near-Earth atmospheric pressure. Actually, I found a picture taken by the Cassini probe in 2006, that shows sand dunes. I suppose I can employ some authorial licence and extrapolate to 'desert'. It was never intended to be hard-SF!

• 09:52 Sorting through slush reader apps. There's too many good ones, I kinda wanna take about ten slush readers, but that seems....impractical. #
• 10:48 Ugh, ants! I hate you, ANTS! We seem to have both the ones seeking sugar and the ones that like fat now. KILL THEM. #
• 22:34 I *heart* the MiddleMan. "There's only one way to talk to an insane ventriloquist." #

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We had our friends Sam and Jodi up for dinner tonight.

The Menu
Napa Cabbage Slaw with Buttermilk Dressing
Rice, Beans, and Corn Salad
Grilled Fish Tacos
Key Lime Pie — made by Rob from fresh Key Limes and sooooo tasty

Comments? -- Link

The more I learn about project management, the less I want to be in charge of it. I would rather be the peon working in the trenches than the person directing it all. One of the designers I worked with on Doomed Project IX ended up moving to our testing location and doing a job that was mostly project management. He loathed it so much that he moved back to our office, just in time to be downsized several months later. However, he is very happy he did so. And I sorta see why.

That doesn't mean that the classes aren't interesting. I got to feel smrt! today, figuring out the math puzzle with only the information that was given. I also learned that I would make a terrible teacher, as I'm not good at slowing down, breaking it down, and explaining how I got the answers I did. I just get impatient.

That may have also been the coffee.

This evening, Mike and I tried playing basketball and a bit of volleyball, and felt old. (I will hurt a lot tomorrow.) Then we walked around the track for a half hour, and I ended up giving him the exact same advice all of the voice-over professionals he'd talked to had given him.

Speaking of which, the major reason that no podcasting has happened yet is that we can't get the mixer to talk to Garage Band. It registers that a recording device is present, but the recording levels are grayed out and stuck at zero, and we're not sure how to change them. The next step is to call Apple and figure it out, and then we'll figure out why the stereo mic cable isn't working. (Mono works, but I'm not thrilled about recording in mono.)

Note to self: That book you were thinking about was Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone.

Note to self, the second: You don't need any more books. You currently have around 300 books at home that you haven't read. (The perks of working for publishing companies!) And then there are the library books...and books about books...

Finished: The Next Fix
Currently Reading: Everything Bad Is Good for You, back issues of Apex Digest
Currently listening: Into the Wild

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test...

NFPS - The Guru

Day three of our vacation, and I'm bruised. This afternoon I smacked my shin on a wooden pool lounge chair. It swelled up real nice. Later, in the evening, I sashayed off a curb and almost fell into the street. Yesterday I walked into the glass coffee table in our rental condo. In the restaurant 2 days ago, I almost fell backwards off a step. 

I've always been like this, stepping off curbs into ditches, stumbling on sidewalk cracks, banging into tables, walking into glass walls at the mall. The earliest whack I remember is getting my clock cleaned at age 12 when I walked into a lifeguard chair; I walked out with a shiner. My accident prone tendencies can be funny, almost Chaplinesque, the stuff of slapstick, but I fear some major mishap is just one step away. I'll tumble into an open manhole and never be seen again... or at the least, break my neck. 

I was trying to do some research on accident prone people. I read about vision problems, aging, mental impairment, personality types,  ADHD, and risk takers--  Okay, I'm "older," I have ADD, and wear trifocals, but that doesn't explain my youthful clumsiness, and I'm about as risky as a log. Research does show that there is a definite percentage of people who have more accidents than the norm, but there was no explanation as to why. My daughter asked me what I look at when I'm walking. It's certainly not my feet. How many people watch their feet when they walk? Or, should I watch my feet when I walk? My husband said to "be more careful." I don't think that's the kind of help I need! Maybe I should wear my son's hockey gear.

ArmadilloCon was great. Did good business in the dealer room (especially the Denton and Rountree books). Heard a couple of good readings (Steven Utley impatientape and joshrountree fer instance. In place of the usual Sunday afternoon Waldrop reading there was a special reading of "The Ugly Chickens" by a cast of eight with Howard calling in for the last page. It was very sweet.

Too many highlights! Saturday night Nicholas got to jam with Brad Denton, David Lee Alexander, Caroline Specter, Rory Harper, Bob (husband of Maureen McHugh), Josh Rountree and a couple of guys whose names I didn't catch. They played for three and a half hours because, even though he tried to put his foot on their necks, the Man could not stop the music!

Great meals with great friends like Nancy Jane Moore, Steven Utley, Jessica Reisman, Patrick Swenson, Josh and Kristin Rountree, Samantha Henderson (thanks for sharing your dinner with N!), Mikal Trimm, Eric Marin, and people I'm surely forgetting to mention. The inherent trouble with the Name Check Con Report.

Whew. Nice to be home though.

It looks like I won't make it to the gig after all. Migraine.

Those of you who're going, enjoy!