Intrepid monster-hunters

Defending the homestead from monsters.


Maybe monsters don't notice her sneaking up on them if she doesn't wear clothes?




Neighbors' house: under lockdown. Watch out for those monsters.








Intrepid monster-hunters checking the mailbox.

Another week of DS1 cooking for the family

raw meat! yummy!

weekly cooking pictures

Well, we totally forgot about taking cooking pictures. He made shrimp fried rice this week.

So here's a bag of rice! And DS1 working at the computer!




Beautiful DS2




And the toddler doing some drawings:


That's a, um.... horse, I think she said?



And this one was.... Oh, beats me. That's my lovely rendition of a leaf next to it.

If you're going to rant

about the state of education today

(based on an Oprah show, because you know that Oprah IS an expert in EVERYTHING)

then don't make the plurals of "moms" and "dads" with apostrophes in them.

Because guess what? Looks like the schools failed you 30 years ago.

Too Much Information, running through my brain

Too Much Information, driving me insane.

Look away NOW!

1) when's menopause? 31 day cycle, then 26 day? And more than half is PMS?
2) And I know the toddler is potty training a lot earlier than her brothers managed it, but when they did it, they were fine with everything, except the occasional accident. She poops in her underwear. EVERY DAY. Well, not if she has a diaper on. Either that, or she holds it in.

There, now you can read again.

A book!

Not necessarily a good book. Not even really ready to let other people read.

But I got to 85K words (almost) and I think it's a whole story. It's a bit shorter than I have done in the past and I know that there are dull spots as my narrator explains what she did over certain gaps of time - I either need to cut those back or make them more interesting and relevant to the story.

My brand new critique partner is reading the first five chapters and we'll meet again on Wednesday to talk about them. I read her first 5 chapters and nit-picked it to death. I hope she doesn't mind.

Anyway, it's a romance novel, but more on the chick-lit end of the spectrum. I wanted to cover a good portion of my heroine/narrator's life, not just the romance part. I wanted you to see how she has grown, mentally and psychologically, over the course of twenty years.

DS1 cooking dinner again last night

And now he's typing up the recipe. Looks like we're in for a loooong night.


Layering cheese and noodles and sauce - making lasagna.


I believe the face was for having his picture taken, not about the quality of his fruit salad.


Everything ready, no lasagna yet. It always a lot longer to cook than the recipe I have says it will.

new computer!

We gave up on the old laptop. Yesterday, I went to turn it on in the evening and couldn't even boot it up in safe mode. I'm in a bit of a panic because there are things on there that I didn 't back up, but a friend has loaned me a wire/plug-in contraption that we can (I hope) plug the hard drive into to get all my stuff and all the pictures and so on and so forth.

And most of the book that I spent this whole month writing, that's been flying out of my head and onto the screen? I didn't back it all up. Yeah, I hope this transfer doohickey works...

I'm wondering how I'm going to get my e-books off of there. I'm hoping I can re-download them, but not sure if it will let me put them all on a second computer. In good news: all my paperback and hardback books are over there on the shelf, perfectly safe. I guess in case of a house fire, it would be harder to replace them, but in case of a house fire, we'd be replacing the computer and e-reader anyway.

So now I have to get used to teeny-tiny writing on a giant screen again, instead of enormous writing and blue spots and scrolling back and forth and up and down constantly to read things.

I wrote 2500-ish words anyway today, writing the big fight scene and some of the aftermath. Still a couple of chapters left to go and that's it for a rough draft. Assuming I can retrieve it. Lordy, there's that nausea again. When did I start this thing?

Making pizza.

So. Last Friday, DS1 was given an assignment to plan a dinner and cook it. I found out about it on Tuesday night. I made DS1 sit down and look at a website with recipes. He took almost 3 hours to find a recipe for pizza and write down the ingredients.

I said sorry, I don't make pizza dough from scratch, buddy.

We went to Trader Joe's on the way home from school on Wednesday and bought a couple of blobby bags of gooey TJ's pizza dough, some grated cheese, and some frozen vegetables.

And with the TJ's spaghetti sauce with some tomato paste mixed in to make the sauce, it was really good.



The helper


Cheese!


Cheese pizza baking


Pepperoni and half mushroom waiting to bake.


A small interlude as we wait for the pizza to bake.


And still interlude.


And revenge (interlude)


And dinner!


Ahhhh!

It was really good, too.

The experiment is still on-going

As you can tell by my TWO tickers, I am working like crazy on my second project instead of finishing the one that I plotted out. I already have almost as many words written on the second one, even though I've been writing it for only a week

It's a lot of fun and I'm still getting to the really exciting parts.

The heroine might be a bit of Mary Sue, so that will take some work. And it might be crap, you know? The parts I've re-read I've liked, but they're nothing like anything else I've done. Well, maybe a bit like the other contemporary novels I started and never quite got to the end of.

Right. Back to work.