Update of Many Things
I have figured out how to work when Charlie refuses to be anywhere but attached to me. I put him in the Baby Bjorn, and move the computer to the bar in the dining room, which as it happens is just the right height that I can stand and type without having to bend over or strain my neck. If I can get a squishy mat, it might even be more comfortable than the desk. I know it’s a thing to stand while you’re typing now; I didn’t think I’d ever be part of a thing.
Also, it puts me in an excellent position to easily see when Andrew’s bus is coming down the street. At the desk, my back is toward the direction the bus comes from, which doesn’t give me any advance warning.
Charlie is having a Day. I think it’s a growth spurt thing; at least, I can’t think of any other reason for it. He’s drinking a ton and sleeping in between and when he’s not sleeping and not eating he’s absolutely inconsolable. It’s not teething - there’s no spots in his mouth and he’s not drooling a bit and I gave him Tylenol and that didn’t soothe him one iota, which it ought to have done if he was in pain or discomfort. I think he’s just… sad, I suppose. I can’t blame him, it’s raining cats and dogs outside so it’s cool and miserable and we can’t go anywhere because anywhere we’d go, we’d have to walk a distance between the car and the building and we’d be soaked to the skin. Luckily, Thursday is not a day we are meant to go anywhere anyway, so Charlie and I are staying home.
(Andrew went to school, walking through several very deep water puddles to get to the bus, but he’s Andrew. He lives to walk through very deep water puddles. If the rain has abated by the time he’s home, he’ll want to ride his bike through them, too.)
(Cleo is annoyed because of the rain, but Annoyed is a perpetual state for Cleo. Then again - she curled up on my lap the other day while I was rocking Charlie to sleep, and started purring up a storm. And every time I take him for a walk in the neighborhood, she follows us, like she’s worried I’m going to accidentally forget how to get home. Then again, my memory’s kind of shot so it’s a valid concern from her, I guess. I think she likes Charlie, or at least views him as one of her kittens.)
The big news here is that I am definitely writing this original Omegaverse story. I’ve got just over 8,000 words on it, and I’m pretty sure not all of them are complete crap, and I know where I’m going for at least another thousand, at which point I will have finished what I’ve already privately dubbed Part One and I can take a breath and think about what happens next. And how I want to present it, too - do I write the whole thing and present it as a full, complete story, or do I want to present it as a serial (though of course I’d write the whole thing first, I don’t like WIPs in fanfic, there’s no way I’d try it as my first paid-for-story experiment).
In the meantime, Bill is having a grand time. Remember how we had a sheet of paper on the fridge so that we could brainstorm baby names for Charlie? Well, we’re currently doing the same thing for pen names for me. I don’t object to publishing under my own name… but I think it would be prudent to not publish this under my own name, for a variety of reasons. Bill has been working hard to come up with some truly outlandish names, because after all, that is exactly what Bill does best. (Current winner: Isobel Chorizo. “It is a spicy sausage of which she writes!” Insert groans here.)
Anyway, feel free to submit your own suggestions. I’m inclined to take a page from EGT’s book (figuratively, as we’re discussing names; if I took a literal page regarding names from her book, it would sort of defeat the purpose of picking a pen name) and take a first name that is what I would have wanted for myself when I was ten. I never minded the name Sharon - but I always wished I had a “y” in my name. I didn’t particularly like the nickname Sherry growing up, but I don’t think I’d mind it too much as a pen name. (Which is why Sherry Amour was briefly on the list. It took Bill twenty minutes to figure out the reference. Sadly, there’s already a Sherry Amour making music, so it was crossed off.)
But I’ve decided - I’m definitely going to put this story up for sale on Amazon when I’m done. (Amazon, mostly because I’m not aware of other platforms. Feel free to educate me.) And I even have a goal for what I’m going to do with whatever it earns. Charlie ended up sleeping all the way through Andrew’s gymnastics class yesterday - I think it was likely the first of the growth spurt sleeps - which would be totally awesome, except all I had to entertain me - other than watching Andrew which is total entertainment, don’t get me wrong - was my phone. And I really, really desperately wanted to write. Problem being… well, since Charlie, I’ve had a lot of trouble writing long-hand. I just can’t do it, the words don’t flow. Which is sad, it used to be one of my favorite ways to write, and I have all these lovely notebooks, and all these lovely words in my head, and they’re not translating except via keyboard.
And I thought, I don’t want to lug my laptop around, because I have a freakin’ big laptop. I sort of like having a freaking big laptop, really, I like the larger screen size and the larger keyboard, and I like not having to add a monitor or separate keyboard to get the larger size. But wouldn’t it be nice if I had something smaller - say, netbook size, to stick in my purse or Charlie’s diaper bag and carry around?
So that’s the goal. Sell the story, maybe earn enough to buy myself a little netbook capable of word processing, and write more stories. I think it’s a good goal. I have no idea if it’s a reasonable goal, but I guess I’ll figure that out as I go.
*
Let’s see, other news… okay, whatever else I’ve screwed up, I think I’ve done pretty well with Andrew lately. In the last week, I keep catching him being polite, completely on his own and without prompting. He says please and thank you and he’s getting much better about saying hello to friends when he sees them out of context, which was previously a problem (he’d ignore them and pretend he didn’t see them at all, but I knew he did because it would be all he could talk about for ages afterwards). He might forget to wash his hands and turn off the light, but at least he’s polite about it when you remind him. SCORE ONE FOR ME, I HAVE A POLITE FIVE-YEAR-OLD.
That said, it is pea soup out there and our front yard isn’t so much a front yard as it is a moat, and Andrew is going to race straight through every puddle and come inside sopping wet. But, because he is a polite child, he will happily strip every item of wet clothing off in the front hall in order not to drip all the way through the house.
Maybe I should lay out beach towels in advance….
I have started doing actual brainstorming for the Hamford presentation at Gridlock. That is, the food portion of it - I’m leaving the actual presentation to drinkingcocoa. It’s largely dependent on what the hotel will allow us to do, but at the moment we’re planning on a variety of Stamford- and British-inspired sandwiches and desserts. I’m thinking also to see what sorts of British-flavored crisps they stock at World Market, because foreign-flavored chips are way more entertaining than what we see in American grocery stores. I wish I could get my hands on balsamic vinegar and sea salt crisps, which are my hands-down favorite chip ever, but I’ve never seen them in the States. (I’m still amazed I found them in Cairo - only that one time, though, I totally should have bought the lot.) But I believe World Market has ketchup and roast chicken and maybe prawn cocktail, if we’re lucky, so that’ll do. Figure we buy a few bags and the folks who have always been intrigued but didn’t want to spend the money can actually sample and decide if they like them or not.
Speaking of food - Bill’s garden is coming in nicely this summer. We’ve got herbs and spring onions on the porch, so I can grab them easily while I’m cooking dinner or making salads, and the main garden has zucchini, pickling cucumbers, bell peppers, jalepenos, banana peppers, Roma tomatoes, and then there’s a pumpkin plant in the far corner. The zucchini and cucumber plants are flowering like crazy - at least, they were before the rains kicked in - and I even saw a couple of itsy bitsy tiny zucchini on one, so I’m super hopeful that they don’t die. It would be nice to actually have zucchini from one of the plants this year.
Oh - and I made cottage cheese yesterday morning. It was an accidental thing - not making it, but the fact that I had enough milk to make it. I’d gone grocery shopping and couldn’t for the life of me remember how much milk we had in the house, because Andrew’s been drinking it up like crazy lately, and I’ve run out twice in the last month. So I bought a gallon, and then came home and realized I had two gallons already in the fridge. Which is just way more milk than he can get through. A Google search turned up a recipe for cottage cheese from Alton Brown that called for a gallon of milk, so I gave it a try. OMG SO GOOD. Super easy, too. I am totally making it again, when the mood strikes. I might even buy milk on purpose for it.
The funny thing is that I posted about it on Tumblr, as I do with most of the stuff I make, and that post has managed to get over a hundred notes, which is just amusing the heck out of me. It’s cottage cheese. You wouldn’t think cottage cheese (or being quite that grass-rootsy) would have such a fanatical following, but apparently so.
It’s been half an hour since I started this - Charlie continues to sleep like gangbusters in the Baby Bjorn. This might be the new world order on how I get anything done these days - but I’ll go ahead and post because I’d like to be ready for the deluge when Andrew gets off the bus.
Also, it puts me in an excellent position to easily see when Andrew’s bus is coming down the street. At the desk, my back is toward the direction the bus comes from, which doesn’t give me any advance warning.
Charlie is having a Day. I think it’s a growth spurt thing; at least, I can’t think of any other reason for it. He’s drinking a ton and sleeping in between and when he’s not sleeping and not eating he’s absolutely inconsolable. It’s not teething - there’s no spots in his mouth and he’s not drooling a bit and I gave him Tylenol and that didn’t soothe him one iota, which it ought to have done if he was in pain or discomfort. I think he’s just… sad, I suppose. I can’t blame him, it’s raining cats and dogs outside so it’s cool and miserable and we can’t go anywhere because anywhere we’d go, we’d have to walk a distance between the car and the building and we’d be soaked to the skin. Luckily, Thursday is not a day we are meant to go anywhere anyway, so Charlie and I are staying home.
(Andrew went to school, walking through several very deep water puddles to get to the bus, but he’s Andrew. He lives to walk through very deep water puddles. If the rain has abated by the time he’s home, he’ll want to ride his bike through them, too.)
(Cleo is annoyed because of the rain, but Annoyed is a perpetual state for Cleo. Then again - she curled up on my lap the other day while I was rocking Charlie to sleep, and started purring up a storm. And every time I take him for a walk in the neighborhood, she follows us, like she’s worried I’m going to accidentally forget how to get home. Then again, my memory’s kind of shot so it’s a valid concern from her, I guess. I think she likes Charlie, or at least views him as one of her kittens.)
The big news here is that I am definitely writing this original Omegaverse story. I’ve got just over 8,000 words on it, and I’m pretty sure not all of them are complete crap, and I know where I’m going for at least another thousand, at which point I will have finished what I’ve already privately dubbed Part One and I can take a breath and think about what happens next. And how I want to present it, too - do I write the whole thing and present it as a full, complete story, or do I want to present it as a serial (though of course I’d write the whole thing first, I don’t like WIPs in fanfic, there’s no way I’d try it as my first paid-for-story experiment).
In the meantime, Bill is having a grand time. Remember how we had a sheet of paper on the fridge so that we could brainstorm baby names for Charlie? Well, we’re currently doing the same thing for pen names for me. I don’t object to publishing under my own name… but I think it would be prudent to not publish this under my own name, for a variety of reasons. Bill has been working hard to come up with some truly outlandish names, because after all, that is exactly what Bill does best. (Current winner: Isobel Chorizo. “It is a spicy sausage of which she writes!” Insert groans here.)
Anyway, feel free to submit your own suggestions. I’m inclined to take a page from EGT’s book (figuratively, as we’re discussing names; if I took a literal page regarding names from her book, it would sort of defeat the purpose of picking a pen name) and take a first name that is what I would have wanted for myself when I was ten. I never minded the name Sharon - but I always wished I had a “y” in my name. I didn’t particularly like the nickname Sherry growing up, but I don’t think I’d mind it too much as a pen name. (Which is why Sherry Amour was briefly on the list. It took Bill twenty minutes to figure out the reference. Sadly, there’s already a Sherry Amour making music, so it was crossed off.)
But I’ve decided - I’m definitely going to put this story up for sale on Amazon when I’m done. (Amazon, mostly because I’m not aware of other platforms. Feel free to educate me.) And I even have a goal for what I’m going to do with whatever it earns. Charlie ended up sleeping all the way through Andrew’s gymnastics class yesterday - I think it was likely the first of the growth spurt sleeps - which would be totally awesome, except all I had to entertain me - other than watching Andrew which is total entertainment, don’t get me wrong - was my phone. And I really, really desperately wanted to write. Problem being… well, since Charlie, I’ve had a lot of trouble writing long-hand. I just can’t do it, the words don’t flow. Which is sad, it used to be one of my favorite ways to write, and I have all these lovely notebooks, and all these lovely words in my head, and they’re not translating except via keyboard.
And I thought, I don’t want to lug my laptop around, because I have a freakin’ big laptop. I sort of like having a freaking big laptop, really, I like the larger screen size and the larger keyboard, and I like not having to add a monitor or separate keyboard to get the larger size. But wouldn’t it be nice if I had something smaller - say, netbook size, to stick in my purse or Charlie’s diaper bag and carry around?
So that’s the goal. Sell the story, maybe earn enough to buy myself a little netbook capable of word processing, and write more stories. I think it’s a good goal. I have no idea if it’s a reasonable goal, but I guess I’ll figure that out as I go.
*
Let’s see, other news… okay, whatever else I’ve screwed up, I think I’ve done pretty well with Andrew lately. In the last week, I keep catching him being polite, completely on his own and without prompting. He says please and thank you and he’s getting much better about saying hello to friends when he sees them out of context, which was previously a problem (he’d ignore them and pretend he didn’t see them at all, but I knew he did because it would be all he could talk about for ages afterwards). He might forget to wash his hands and turn off the light, but at least he’s polite about it when you remind him. SCORE ONE FOR ME, I HAVE A POLITE FIVE-YEAR-OLD.
That said, it is pea soup out there and our front yard isn’t so much a front yard as it is a moat, and Andrew is going to race straight through every puddle and come inside sopping wet. But, because he is a polite child, he will happily strip every item of wet clothing off in the front hall in order not to drip all the way through the house.
Maybe I should lay out beach towels in advance….
I have started doing actual brainstorming for the Hamford presentation at Gridlock. That is, the food portion of it - I’m leaving the actual presentation to drinkingcocoa. It’s largely dependent on what the hotel will allow us to do, but at the moment we’re planning on a variety of Stamford- and British-inspired sandwiches and desserts. I’m thinking also to see what sorts of British-flavored crisps they stock at World Market, because foreign-flavored chips are way more entertaining than what we see in American grocery stores. I wish I could get my hands on balsamic vinegar and sea salt crisps, which are my hands-down favorite chip ever, but I’ve never seen them in the States. (I’m still amazed I found them in Cairo - only that one time, though, I totally should have bought the lot.) But I believe World Market has ketchup and roast chicken and maybe prawn cocktail, if we’re lucky, so that’ll do. Figure we buy a few bags and the folks who have always been intrigued but didn’t want to spend the money can actually sample and decide if they like them or not.
Speaking of food - Bill’s garden is coming in nicely this summer. We’ve got herbs and spring onions on the porch, so I can grab them easily while I’m cooking dinner or making salads, and the main garden has zucchini, pickling cucumbers, bell peppers, jalepenos, banana peppers, Roma tomatoes, and then there’s a pumpkin plant in the far corner. The zucchini and cucumber plants are flowering like crazy - at least, they were before the rains kicked in - and I even saw a couple of itsy bitsy tiny zucchini on one, so I’m super hopeful that they don’t die. It would be nice to actually have zucchini from one of the plants this year.
Oh - and I made cottage cheese yesterday morning. It was an accidental thing - not making it, but the fact that I had enough milk to make it. I’d gone grocery shopping and couldn’t for the life of me remember how much milk we had in the house, because Andrew’s been drinking it up like crazy lately, and I’ve run out twice in the last month. So I bought a gallon, and then came home and realized I had two gallons already in the fridge. Which is just way more milk than he can get through. A Google search turned up a recipe for cottage cheese from Alton Brown that called for a gallon of milk, so I gave it a try. OMG SO GOOD. Super easy, too. I am totally making it again, when the mood strikes. I might even buy milk on purpose for it.
The funny thing is that I posted about it on Tumblr, as I do with most of the stuff I make, and that post has managed to get over a hundred notes, which is just amusing the heck out of me. It’s cottage cheese. You wouldn’t think cottage cheese (or being quite that grass-rootsy) would have such a fanatical following, but apparently so.
It’s been half an hour since I started this - Charlie continues to sleep like gangbusters in the Baby Bjorn. This might be the new world order on how I get anything done these days - but I’ll go ahead and post because I’d like to be ready for the deluge when Andrew gets off the bus.