Category: Uncategorized

Where I’ve Been

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Snowed under, mostly.

Well, not quite in the literal sense; the driveway and the front door never actually became impassable, though the town snowplows were admirably zealous in replacing the ridge of snow at the foot of the driveway on a regular basis. Nevertheless, February was a bitterly cold and snowy month, with only a couple of days when the temperature outside even drew near 32°F, and so far March has only taken us above freezing for a couple of afternoons – not enough to melt all the snow by a long shot, and the weather forecast for the next week is calling for more snow and daytime temps somewhere in the twenties.

The cold winter, with the thermometer occasionally swinging from twenty below to twenty above in the same 24-hour period, has also played merry hell with our plumbing.  A word to those contemplating a move to deep snow country:  PVC pipes do not cope well with conditions of extreme cold, and their natural lifespan is greatly shortened on that account.  Pipes all over town have been freezing and breaking and springing leaks, and the local plumbers have all the business they can handle.

All of this is a long way around to explaining why I haven’t posted for a while.  I’ve got a post on commas in the works; meanwhile, have a couple of amusing or at least interesting links:

If you’re writing a fantasy novel and one or more entries on this list make you cringe, you may need to rethink a few things.

Also, a blog post on the origins of “okay”.  (Personal position statement here:  I’ve always favored the Cherokee and/or African loan-word theory, and think that the “Orll Korrect” and “Old Kinderhook” etymologies are a bunch of hooey.)

And finally, a tale of modern-day cattle-rustling in the Texas Panhandle.

 

For Your Amusement

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A trio of links, from the useful to the odd.

Table Scraps — a food history blog, with more blog links in the sidebar.  (Including one to Pass the Garum!, a blog about Roman cookery.)

Three-Panel Book Reviews, a webcomic that says entirely truthful and funny things about works of literature.  I especially liked the one about Jonathan Franzen, but they’re all good.

And finally, a performance of “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave” (as “Little Matty Groves” was known before it crossed the Atlantic) sung in Esperanto.

A Position Statement, of Sorts

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In the wake of the Paris attacks, there’s been much earnest discussion going on, in those quarters of the internet where earnest discussion always hangs out, over whether Charlie Hebdo‘s political satires were, in fact, racist, anti-Muslim, and so forth, or whether they were part of a long-standing tradition in French political expression (Daumier keeps getting brought up, for example, and pre-Revolutionary cartoons about Marie Antoinette), and about whether Charlie Hebdo was punching up, or down, or sideways. These are arguments I’m not going to get into, because, one, there are few things more impenetrable to the outside observer than another country’s political humor, and two, from where I stand as a free-speech absolutist, it shouldn’t matter whether Charlie Hebdo was punching in the right direction, punching in the wrong direction, or spinning madly around in all directions like a punching top . . . shooting up a bunch of people because of something they said, or wrote, or drew is just plain wrong.

Shooting up a bunch of unarmed people is wrong to start with, for heaven’s sake. And doing it because they were saying, or writing, or drawing something that the shooter wanted to silence is a heaping big plate of wrongness with wrong sauce poured over it and a maraschino cherry of wrong on top.

Christmas Eve

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And a Merry Christmas tomorrow for all who celebrate it, and the very best of whatever seasonal cheer you most desire for all of those who celebrate other things, or at other seasons, or not at all.

Things You Figure Out about the Past

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…if you live in a cold climate and are stingy with your heating (as we have always been, first because we were heating with a wood furnace, and willingness to put up with lower interior temperatures directly correlates with unwillingness to move large heavy logs from woodpile to furnace several times a day for an entire winter; and second because when we finally got tired of heaving logs around we dropped back to the electric baseboard heat, which is like burning dollar bills to keep warm):

  • Footstools weren’t just ornamental. They were to keep your feet off the cold floor, so that what warmth you could pull around yourself didn’t leak out through the soles of your shoes.
  • Shawls and caps and fingerless gloves weren’t just fashion statements. They kept the drafts off the back of your neck, and kept heat from leaking out through the palms of your hands and the top of your head.
  • Lapdogs weren’t just frivolous pets. They were self-propelled organic personal space heaters for people who could afford the cost of feeding an otherwise unproductive household critter. (Cats and small terriers could also fulfill the “space heater” function, but escaped the “silly rich woman’s toy” stigma by also catching household vermin.)

Presented for Your Amusement

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A quartet of links to things that caught my eye or tickled my fancy over the past few days:

For Your Amusement

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A trio of links:

These people have developed a blight-resistant American chestnut tree, and are now crowdfunding a project to plant 10,000 new trees and start the work of bringing the species back to American forests.

Here are some nifty pictures of spherical layer cakes frosted to look like planets – complete with proper planetary cores.  And here’s a link to a tutorial on how to make one yourself at home.

And finally, in honor of the upcoming holiday, a link to NASA’s cornbread dressing recipe.

Public Service Announcement

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Have you gotten your flu shot yet?

Jim Macdonald (my husband/co-author) and I got ours last week, as part of our prep for teaching at the Viable Paradise workshop a couple of weeks from now.  A gathering of writers from all over the United States and, in fact, the world — the last time I checked, we had a couple of students coming from overseas, plus a couple of Canadians – is a prime site for the exchange of seasonal maladies, and we didn’t want to be the folks who brought the flu to the gathering, nor yet do we want to bring a sample home.

Our immunizations were covered by our insurance policy (thank you, President Obama, from the bottom of my freelance-writer’s heart!), and yours probably are, too.

Do your bit for herd immunity, for the sake of the allergic and the immunocompromised, who might like to get the shot, but can’t, and who rely on the rest of us to keep epidemics at bay.

Look! A Link!

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My spouse and co-author, James D. Macdonald, has some new posts up over at his blog:

One on the start, a hundred years and two days ago, of the Great War, as they called it during the twenty years or so before it became unpleasantly clear that they were going to have to do it all over again, only louder and longer and with more atrocities.

One with a Smashwords coupon code for a free short story by the two of us.

A brief note on Yog’s Law.

And all you need to know about the plot of Great Expectations, in three stanzas.

Go.  Enjoy.

Because It’s Been a While

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Here – have a recipe.

Monkey Bread

Ingredients

  • 3 cans of buttermilk biscuits
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 2 sticks butter
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Open up all three cans of biscuits and cut each biscuit into quarters.

Next, combine the white sugar and the cinnamon in a 1 gallon zip-lock bag and shake it to mix them up evenly.

Drop all of the biscuit quarters into the bag of cinnamon-sugar mix. Seal the bag and shake it until the biscuit quarters are evenly covered.

Fill up a bundt pan or similar baking pan (we use a panettone mold around here.)

Melt the two sticks of butter and the half cup of brown sugar together in the microwave, or in a saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Once the brown sugar/melted butter mix has become one color, pour it over the pan full of biscuit pieces.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes until the crust is a deep dark brown on top. Then remove it from the oven and allow it to cool on a wire rack for about 15-30 minutes.

Turn it out onto a plate; pull it apart with two forks to serve.

This is the quick and easy version.  You could get fancier, I suppose, by making up a batch of sweet yeast dough, either by hand or in a bread machine, cutting or tearing the risen dough into approximately 36 pieces, and forming the pieces into balls which you then coat in cinnamon sugar as above.  Then put them into the baking pan and allow them to rise a second time before going on to the melted butter and brown sugar step and proceeding with the recipe from there.

But in all honesty, the biscuit version tastes just fine, and is a whole lot faster and easier.

(Also:  I have no idea why it’s called “monkey bread.”  One theory is that the bread takes its name from a fancied resemblance between the pattern of the stacked lumps of dough and the pattern of the bark on the trunk of a monkey-puzzle tree . . . but I think that may be stretching it.)