Month: May 2024

Scorpions and such

I had Plans for today but then I got called in to work. (Story of my life) That kind of cast a pall over the day, which did not exactly dawn bright and cheery in the first place. Then as I was getting dressed, I found a scorpion in my pants, so that was fun. Fortunately for me, it was already dead (probably got washed and dried with the jeans), so I did not get stung, but you better believe I won’t be throwing my dirty clothes on the bathroom floor for a while.

Anyway, instead of spending a couple hours at the library, I spent it sorting and stocking and organizing stuff in the big cooler at work, and now I’m tired. Also it very rudely started raining while I was in the grocery store, and now I am slightly damp and the humidity is at 110%. I’m going to eat shitty frozen pizza and lie down, and then maybe I’ll have the energy to do writing things. I got in 1800 words yesterday so I guess I could give myself a break, but I’d really like to get the next chapter started while the words are still in my head…

Pancakes

I have kind of gotten out of the habit of cooking for myself. This has been true for a while, and has only gotten worse as the medication bingo drags on. The anxiety meds I’m on now have ruined my appetite, which is a bad combo with the whole executive dysfunction thing.

But every once in a while I wake up and want a nice breakfast. Mostly I just make fried eggs on toast, but I’ve collected a couple of go-to recipes for when I’m feeling more adventurous. One is a Chinese recipe I found on Tumblr for scrambled eggs with tomatoes. Due to Tumblr being a barely functional trash bin, I was unable to locate the recipe, but basically, scramble some eggs, remove from pan, put a chopped up tomato in the pan with a bit of oil, mirin, soy sauce, seasonings to taste (I use curry powder because I don’t have Chinese five spice which was what was in the recipe, and a dash of sesame oil. I also subbed the mirin for chinese rice wine because that’s what I had on hand. I’ve also made it with rice vinegar, but you’ll need to add some sugar to cut the acidity and make it thicken.) Cook at medium heat until the tomatoes break down and the liquid thickens into a sauce consistency, add the eggs back in and cook until they are heated back up. You’re supposed to serve over rice, but I can’t eat rice, so I just have it without, although I did put it over soba once, and it wasn’t bad. But cooking noodles for anything requires timing and I generally can’t be bothered.

But today, I wanted pancakes. My favorite regular pancake recipe is the Silver Dollar Pancakes from Penzey’s. No link for this either, since it seems to not be on their site anymore. I made it today with soymilk for the first time, since I was out of lactose free milk, and I have to say, the recipe doesn’t really hold up with it. It also required me to raise the temperature by a half setting to get the good golden crisping, which is kind of interesting. Maybe because of the lower fat content? I always buy whole milk. It’s what I grew up on, and even though I can’t actually drink the stuff, old habits and all that. Plus instant pudding tastes better with whole milk.

I ate the pancakes despite not being particularly impressed by the effort. I like them with whipped cream or ice cream, but my freezer is being a butt about ice cream (it wont stay frozen sigh) and I don’t have cream either, because I didn’t get to the grocery store yet, so I tried them with a dollop of lemon Greek yogurt and some strawberry preserves. It was fine, not great, but I did eat it all. (I’m not a fan of yogurt, but of the kinds I’ve tried, Chobani’s Greek style yogurt is…edible. The one I’ve liked the best is Oui, because it’s almost like pudding.)

I also like to make Japanese style pancakes every now and then, but those are a bit more effort than I can be bothered with just now. I use the Cooking With Dog recipe. (And look! An actual link to that one! ;)

A Tuesday

Tuesdays are always exhausting. We get our grocery truck on Thursdays, and as the person in charge of ordering and stocking the groceries (basically all the sale items not brought in by major vendors like Budweiser, Coca-Cola, or the other large franchises) it is my job to check it all in. I used to have help for this, but not currently.

Today was hazy and hot and muggy as hell, and the truck was a good three hours late, not arriving until almost three in the afternoon. Because they never actually arrive at the same time every week, this means I get there around noon, and may have to sit around for a couple of hours on a day like today, when they are catastrophically late. For some reason, they never let us know when they’re running late, we have to call ourselves. It’s annoying.

The sitting around doesn’t bother me so much–I do not have any internet at my house aside from the hotspot from my phone, which is throttled because our plan is old and cheap. I’m lucky if it will let me open up any site more bandwidth-intensive than a simple wordpress site. (Just for an example, it took about several minutes for it to load this page so I could make a new post. Ugh.) So I bring my laptop with me, and do all the Internet Things I can’t do at home. Today I did some editing, then wrote a little while I was waiting. (People kept coming over to interrupt me, so it was a very little.)

The real problem with them getting there so late is that the sun shines right in the windows all evening, so I got to stock twelve totes of groceries, plus the 40+ products that came in cases, during the hottest part of the day. Fun times. I am functionally dead now, suitable only for vegetating.

I have work in the morning, too, so there’s no time to get anything done tonight, even if I had the energy, since I got home around eight. I could poke at the manuscript some more, since I didn’t hit my ideal word count, but if I do that I’ll end up staying awake way too late, because I always do. I’m definitely a ‘time does not exist ADHD’. I’m just chilling on the futon in my studio, sort of watching Stargate SG1 on my phone while I type this. I’ve been watching it on and off on one of those free streaming apps; my attention span has been mostly non-existent for TV lately, so I usually just put on something I’ve already seen for the noise, which, lately, has been Iron Chef or Avatar the Last Air Bender, but I managed to watch most of Aquaman last night, which made me want to watch Stargate Atlantis again, but I want to at least get through the parts of SG1 before the spinoff first. BUT the first season is so bad, I’m slowly dying inside, the nineties were SUCH a bad time for female representation in science fiction TV. Like, I will stan Samantha Carter until the end of time, a true science queen, but so many problems would have been solved, narratively speaking, if they could have gotten away from the damn Token Female thing.

(The imperialism is…also not a good look. At least the show seems somewhat aware of this, though.)

(Aquaman was okay, but the CGI was…not very good. I can’t imagine it looked good on the big screen, when I was cringing through that first fight scene just watching in on the smallest phone screen currently available. Jason Momoa *almost* made up for it. Speaking purely aesthetically, he is very nice to look at, but they should have given him a better script, and beefed up the SFX budget. Also I’m just like. Not a big fan of the One True Good King trope. There was literally no reason why his mom couldn’t have taken the trident and become queen, except for the fact that the movie was called AquaMAN. She was a total badass, she deserved better than a standard Romantic Reunion with Joe Average Dude ending.)

Catching up

Been a while. I always mean to blog more, but I’m an ADHD gremlin to my core, so the inconvenience of attempting it on my phone or tablet tends to discourage my already barely-existent executive dysfunction.

My reading slump continues. I thought it was getting better, but all the impetus to get through the long list of books has dwindled, and my attention span has become so bad since I stopped taking my ADHD meds that even listening to audiobooks a bit at a time has become a chore. I was in the middle of Gideon the Ninth, and it was really good, and I just…can’t pay attention enough to listen without having to stop and rewind every time my brain decides to go off on a tangent.

It was severely impacting my writing too, since I finally finished the draft of my last project. Editing is much harder than writing, especially when your progress is carried more by momentum than intent. There’s a sort of letdown once the euphoria of actually finishing a really long manuscript is over, and it took me a while to get back into the swing with the new one. (I’m not even technically done with the previous project, there’s still a bracketed note that says ‘insert flirting scene here’ that I’m not looking forward to writing.)

But now that I have a laptop again, it makes it much easier to switch around between my various other projects. I’ve started volume three of my steampunk fic, and I’ve made headway on the side story that sort of bridges all three volumes. I’ve been poking at Golden Wolf again, and the Unicorn and Incubus thing. I’ve picked up another research project, for after I’m done with my folklore and fairytales research for that one urban fantasy thing that’s been percolating. It’s about magic systems, how the growth of fantasy as a genre and the advances of science and technology has influenced the way we develop them. Obviously I’ll need the grounding of the fairytales and folklore first, but I have begun to collect early examples of fantasy, like Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (I managed to find a translation online, since I am the last person who would understand Middle English.) I have a spreadsheet that I’m still filling up with books. It’s not as long as the folklore and fantasy spreadsheet yet, but give me time.