lydamorehouse: (lyda cartoon)
 I got exactly ONE patron, despite a rather intensive social media blast and even having a couple of my more popular friends boost the signal. 

Ah well, I tell myself that building a community may take time. 

In other news, it snowed here. 

snowy yard
Image: my front yard with snow covering a big maple, green lawn chairs and a table

This morning, as I went out to get my coffee and bagels, I was reminded of the opening scene in "Fargo," a movie with which I have a kind of love/hate relationship. I felt like some of the Minnesota stuff was played up a bit much (though, yes, we talk like that occasionally.) But, say what you will, that opening, which depicts a flat landscape where the sky is a slightly darker white than the snow-covered ground is exactly what it is like outside today here in St. Paul--without the flat. Least people from other parts of the world be confused, a lot of western Minnesota is flat like you see in the move, (though, FOR THE RECORD, Fargo is actually in North Dakota,) and like you imagine the Great Plains to be. However, St. Paul and Minneapolis are in the Mississippi River Valley and the landscape is very undulating and, in places, steep here. A river runs through it. And, as you go south of here, towards my hometown of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, you hit a section of country that the second Ice Age missed, the Driftless Zone.

My point, and I do have one, is that I found the grey on grey weirdly cozy this morning.

I should have been irritated because here it is the middle of March and we have enough snow on the ground that I needed to haul out my shovels, but... it just looked like the kind of day that, when you have nowhere you need to be, you can just pull out the fluffy blankets and snuggle under.

The roads are a slippery icy mess, however. I would not recommend going out in this, unless you have to. It's supposed to reach 40 F / 4 C either this afternoon or tomorrow, so it won't last. I feel bad for the folks in Denver, CO, who apparently got buried in snow. 

My plan for the day is to work on a novella (space lesbians!) that I got stalled out on and then do some more outlining for the upcoming book.  
lydamorehouse: (nic & coffee)
 If people are specifically looking to reconnect to their former Tumblr mutuals, there's a new community just for you (and me): the_great_tumblr_purge.  I haven't posted there yet, but I think I will. I'm not exactly a refugee from Tumblr, but I sure would love to be able to recreate the sense of community in fandom that I found there.

Meanwhile, I spent much of today baking. I got up early only to discover that we had no coffee in the house. MAJOR EMERGENCY. So, even though I had to take Mason (my son) into work at the Science Museum at 10 am, I made a mad dash out to my coffee shop and then picked up some extra baking supplies on the way home.

Shawn's friend Liz, someone she's known since kindergarten, came over and we made many batches of cookies. 

These are cookies that Shawn calls "sand tarts." They're a kind of chewy cookie that has an egg wash on the top that makes them somehow even more tasty.

solstice velociraptor cookie

I always sneak in a few non-traditional holiday shapes. I think this year I got both dinosaurs (we have a velociraptor and triceratops) and a dolphin. 

I just finished up a batch of spritz, as well:

red and green spritz cookies

You'd think with as many cookies as we make that we have plans to give them away. But, no. We hoard them and eat them throughout the dark winter months, which, in Minnesota, last until late March.  Shawn will take half of each of these batches and put them in Tupperware and put them i the freezer. That way in the middle of March when the snow drops on us unexpectedly, at least we'll have a few cookies to assuage our deep and unending suffering.

Mason and spent part of the day playing Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. As I am a button masher, I can not hope to defeat Mason. However, I found great joy in picking very pretty characters just to watch capes swirl and whatnot. I am easily amused.
lydamorehouse: (Bazz-B)
 ...I turn to baking.

Shawn really likes to have a LOT of cookies around for the holidays. Not only are they nice to trot out for our usual Thanksgiving guests, but also they are a Sustaining sort of Smackerel to get us Minnesotans through the dark months.  This weekend, we made: Snickerdoodles and Pizelles (Saturday). Nutmeg teacakes, the dough for date cookies, and "failed" pecan tassies were made on Sunday. 

Kowalski's had a whole cut-up chicken on sale, so I made a big roast with mash potatoes, gravy, and green beans. I also made my first French bread loaf of the season.

two very plump French loaves in a curved metal pan

The recipe I use technically makes four, more traditionally skinny baguettes, but I like my bread to be like me: fat and stout.  So, I have always only made two loaves from the recipe, that's why they are not especially baguette-looking. 

They sure are tasty, though.

And, ah... but the eating was gooooooood 
lydamorehouse: (Renji 3/4ths profile)
 The deep freeze has returned to Minnesota. When I got up this morning to take Mason to a robotics club build at Washington, it was - 11 F/ - 23.89 C (I am forever fascinated that Alexa always wants to tell me two decimal points out when she calculates Celsius for me. Do you folks who use Celsius really go that deep?)

Yesterday, it was also cold. Even so, I ventured out of the house to have lunch with my friend Rosanne. We met up at a place over in Minneapolis called Butter Bakery Café.  I found it very easily, despite not having GPS. I mention this because on Wednesday night when I gave a ride home to one of Mason's debate colleagues, we used her iPhone's GPS app to direct me to her house.  It was pretty darn slick and made me think that, if cell phone packages weren't so expensive, it would be almost worth it to have a built in direction-sense. I don't get lost very often, but when I do, I tend to get REALLY lost. I once was nearly a half hour late to work because I forgot how to get out to Mounds View Library.

Butter Bakery Café has a nice parking lot behind their building, too, so that made me very happy. I arrived few minutes before Roseanne so I had a chance to check out their menu.  I have to say, the food was very much in the only OK category. As I told Rosanne, I love breakfast out and I was excited to see they had all day breakfast.  But, their "sunny side up" involved a lot more gooey gross bits than I usually like from my eggs, alas. I got the potatoes and wheat toast as sides, and the potatoes were serviceable, but nothing to write home about.  So, that was a bit of a disappointment, but I wasn't there for the food. I was there for the company and Rosanne is always good company.

She and her partner are retiring. For Rosanne this means graduating writing coach clients, which sounds like it's been a long disentanglement, which makes sense to me. We talked a lot about how it's kind of a shame that writing doesn't work like a regular job, because it would have been nice for her to have an apprentice to pass these clients on to.  

I also agreed to write a blog post for her about my experience with NaNoWriMo, because it's always been Rosanne's contention that it's better to form lifelong habits for writing, and that the competitive nature of NaNoWriMo can actually make you feel like quitting.  I fit that mold.  Not everyone does. I know a lot of people who really LOVE NaNoWriMo for lots of different reasons, but when I tried it I discovered very quickly that the goal set for me 2,000 words a day did NOT work.  When I'm writing original fiction I can't work that fast.  A huge part of my process is revision, which actually takes away words at the end of the day more often than not.  So I kept putting in smaller and smaller word counts and NaNoWriMo "helpfully" produced a graph for me showing my declining "commitment" and so I quit.  This is made ironic by the fact that without anyone's prompting, I've successfully had the discipline to write and finish several published novels. To be fair, though, I set my life up to provide some of the support that I think people really love about NaNoWriMo, which is the community it generates. There are classes and group meet-ups where you can hang out with other writers.  I forged my own writers group that met regularly, and I'm certain that without them I would have given up on my writing, too.

So, it could be a good blog. I just have to figure out how to be more articulate and witty. :-)

The only bummer is by agreeing to meet with Rosanne on Friday, I ended up missing my usual Friday gathering with other women writer friends.  I comforted myself by the fact that a number of us Wyrdsmiths (my writers' group) braved the slippery mess  of Thursday evening's snow in order to give [personal profile] naomikritzer feedback she needed on a short story for an anthology she was invited to contribute to. We meet at Nina's and the coffee shop was startlingly DEAD.

This upcoming week I'm going to meet-up with a friend of mine from high school who got in contact with me because she was looking for contract advice about a non-fiction project she was working on.  (This is partly why I ended up getting back in touch with Rosanne after all this time; I figured Rosanne knew about non-fiction contracts.)  

So, even though it's cold as heck, I'm still getting out and about and meeting up with people. But for now?  Now, I think it's time for a nap under some comforters.

Ja matta!

lydamorehouse: (Default)
 I noticed that Dreamwidth is just "Journal of Lyda Morehouse," but back when LJ wasn't evil, my blog name used to be "Day in the Life of an Idiot."  Today, I would have earned that name.  

It snowed last night.  More importantly, it rained, froze, and then snowed on top of that. It's slippery AF out there, kids.  This is the first real foul winter weather conditions in which we have driven our new-to-us car.  I have never had anti-lock breaks before. First time they engaged (as I was sliding through an intersection) I thought: MY BREAKS ARE BROKEN.  I had no idea they sounded SO AWFUL.  I called Shawn in a panic and she convinced me to take the car to our mechanic.  He just listened to my woes and said, "You say they're stuttering." Then he makes a sound similar (though not as violent) as the horrible noise issuing from my breaks, and adds, "Like that?" I'm like, "OMG, yes, like that." He nods sagely and says, "Those are your anti-lock breaks engaging." I thought about it for a second and said, "Well, I guess that's fixed then," and headed out the door muttering, "It's a feature not a bug!"

I'd feel more embarrassed, but I have literally never had a car with this "feature" before.

Wintery Mix

Nov. 6th, 2013 09:54 am
lydamorehouse: (more renji art)
It's Minnesota, all right.

Here's what we woke up to:

wintery mix 003

wintery mix 004
lydamorehouse: (Default)
We didn't get all the snow the rest of the country has had to deal with. In fact, as Eleanor and I were saying the other day, there's a werid part of us, as Minnesotans, that's a little disappointed when we don't get major storms. On the flip side, it's been gorgeously sunny here, so I'm REALLY not complaining.

In fact, right now, I feel very much like a snow princess. Mason has a half day off school and we just played outside. I love winter days like this. It's just cold enough to put a blush on your cheek, but warm enough that you sweat under your layers. There's something about this kind of day that, when I play outside in it, that makes me feel... healthy. Or, maybe just young again, because the hot/cold of outside winter play is VERY MUCH a feeling I remember as a child in Wisconsin.

And, there's just nothing quite like the quality and intensity of light that we get this time of year. It's BRIGHT. You can almost feel the vitamin D in each ray hitting the very little part of your skin that's actually exposed.

In other news, I may also feel kind of young again because I managed to really strain myself at kuk sool wan last night. As instructed, I attempted a one-handed cartwheel, and, considering my cartwheels (shaky at best) it should be not surprise that I fell on my butt. Twice. I actually left a bit grumpy and had to cheer myself by watching "Shaun the Sheep" claymation shorts (via NetFlix) with Mason and Shawn last night. (OMG the little chicks were CUTE.) I almost never leave kuk grumpy, but I think I was also starting to get the headache that dogged me much of today. (Hooray for [legal] drugs and sunshine.)

It's going to be a busy weekend for us. We're actually invited to a Super Bowl party, and, on Saturday, we have swim class as well as a spontaneous invitation for Mason to go hang out with friends at the Mall's amusement park. Personally, I loathe the Sprawl, but Mason LOVES going on rollercoasters and so when friends who can accompany him offer, it's difficult to say no, since it spares me from having to white-knuckle those rides.

I should be writing, but it's been one of those Fridays when fun things call stronger than writing. I guess I'll have to make it up by writing later tonight. I actually am looking forward to it because I'm really delving into a character that's been on the periphery of Ana's life in the previous Vampire Princess of St. Paul books. He's not based on any particular real person in my past, but he's from a different social class than most of Ana's friends and I'm trying to write honestly about class differences and how they affect relationships. It's nothing truly political or earth-shattering, but I'm not sure it's something a lot of teen romance books deal with (although I may be completely wrong there, not having read that many.) Anyway, it's keeping me interested, which is good since I have write it. :-)

See you on Monday!

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