Yo soy novelista.
In the spirit of the Christmas shopping season, I broke down and bought myself a digital camera. I've held out for so long, but no more. I blame my dad, who took me digital camera shopping when I visited him in New Jersey.
My poor cat, Theo, decided to take a nap on my lap while I opened the box and got everything set up. He wasn't entirely happy with his choice of napping spots, as you can see below.
Hey, I just filled out AMC's feedback form. I feel very sorry for the person who has to sift through all the stuff people send in. Or maybe they just don't read them, but just want people to feel like they actually have a chance to give feedback. Who knows? I filled it out anyhow, which means you all don't have to put up with my bitching anymore. Lucky you!
Okay, the idea of a face transplant is just creepy.
Oh yeah, happy Hedonismday -- I mean, Thanksgiving to those of you who are in the states.
Incidentally, I have given myself permission to not post the last 20,000 words of the so called novel. Otherwise, I don't think I'd reach 50,000 words by Saturday. I have about 41,000 words right now, and it's all utter tripe. It certainly started off better than last year's, but has completely fallen apart. If you are the person who's wondering what happens next: nothing happens next. My character has turned into a big huge whiner who refuses to get off her lazy ass and do something. In other words, it's getting to be rather auto-biographical.
I think most people have those weird, recurring situations in life. For better or worse, here's mine:
I'm at a grocery store, or a deli or something, and the person behind the counter says to me, "Paper or plastic..." or maybe "How can I help you..." But instead of stopping there, they attach a single, very gender-specific syllable: "...Sir?" Now, I don't like being called ma'am, but I'll take it over being called sir.
I was just at Pizzicato, picking up a pizza: "What can I get for you, sir?" And then there was an uncomfortable pause as she actually looked at me, focused her eyes on my face, and saw me standing there, not really knowing what to say. "Oh my god, I'm sorry," she said. "You don't look like a guy at all."
"It's okay," I said, aiming for a wry tone of voice. "Sadly, it's happened before."
The woman behind me gave out a short laugh. "Sadly," she repeated.
I was watching the Conan O'Brien show last weekend and Ice Cube was on. Conan asked where he got the name Ice Cube and he said that when he was about twelve years old, his brother thought he was "being too cool or something" and called him Ice Cube. But the joke was on his brother, he said, because now he makes a lot of money with that name.
Conan asked about other nicknames of the people in his neighborhood, and Ice Cube said there was one guy that everybody called Barefoot Pookie because he always walked around without shoes on. It didn't matter if he was wearing a suit and tie or just casual clothes, the dude was always Barefoot. He didn't know how Pookie ever came into it. The best nickname he mentioned, though, was Western Toehurt. Ice Cube and his friends would always see this guy walking down Western street and the way he walked made it look like his shoes were hurting his feet, so they called him Western Toehurt. That's so cool.
I decided to get some perspective on the novel writing, so I checked out the blog from last November. It looks like I'm a whole three days ahead of last year on the word count, so that's a good sign. Good grief, 20,000 words in five days? I'm surprised I made it. This year, I have a whole eight days to write the final 20,000 words.
I'd like to give a shout out to JByte. Blog on, my friend. Blog on.
Also, I like the tumbleweed girl. Ooh, and I just found out that Susannah is back in the land of the blogging and she had a squirrel in her house. Folks, I'm afraid the squirrels are taking over. I always thought it would be something more obvious, like an uprising of house cats, but I guess I was wrong.
American Movie Classics update: Hot Shots! That old classic.
It's better than Boston Public, though, which has to be the most ridiculous show on television. Even a pirate wouldn't make that show better...
Last night, some friends organized an Iron Chef competition. The secret ingredient? Well, I wanted it to be tater-tots, but it ended up being salmon. That's okay, though, because it gave us a chance to combine the two. Silky and I were Team Alabama (the new soverign country of Alabama).
I was a little daunted when we showed up (late) because everybody else really went all out and had two or three dishes and a wine or beer to serve with their courses. We had salmon and tater-tot sish kebobs and PBR. We put little Alabama state flags on the end of the skewers, though, so at least they looked festive. Mad props to Dana, by the way, for giving me the kebob idea in the first place.
We lost the iron chef competition, although Kathleen was nice and said our salmon tasted the best. Sadly, tater-tots are best fresh out of the oven, and not 30-45 minutes later. Team Polynesia won, but I couldn't eat theirs because it had kiwi in it and I'm allergic to kiwi. I really liked Team Germany's curry dish (very German), and Team Scotland's puff pastries were really excellent. I think they should have won for their cullinary creativity, but they made a potato soup that apparently didn't go over well, so I think they lost overall points for that. I'm pretty sure the salmon-tot kebobs had us in last place, but only because the tots don't travel well.
Anyhow, here's my recipe.
Recipe for Salmon-Tot Kebobs
You will need: Some salmon (thick fillet or steak), some tater-tots (I recommend Ore-Ida), some virgin olive oil, a lemon, herbs if you want them, and skewers
- If you're using bamboo skewers, submerge them in water and leave them for awhile. They should soak at least 10 minutes.
- Put some of the olive oil (about 1/4 c) in a bowl. Then cut the lemon in half and squeeze out all the juice into the same bowl. Put in some herbs (I used about 1½" of a sprig of rosemary, maybe a teaspoon of minced thyme, and then I looked at the clock and realized I was running late, so I kind of pulled apart a little bit of oregano in a very clumsy fashion and dumped that in there -- clumsiness optional).
- Start pre-heating your oven for the tots.
- Cut up the salmon into little cubes -- however big you want 'em. Mine varied from really small to about 1" x 1" x 1". Probably the bigger the better, but I kept running into bones. Try to get salmon without skin or bones. It'll be a lot easier. Put the salmon cubes in the olive oil lemon stuff.
- Follow directions on bag for making your tater-tots in a conventional oven. Only cook them for most of the time recommended.
- When the tater-tots are 5-10 minutes away from being done, take them out of the oven. Then put the salmon cubes and tots on the skewers in whatever creative fashion you deem appropriate. I used three salmon chunks and three tots to a skewer and alternated them. Put them on your broiler pan, if you have one. I never knew what it was for before, but it's that big two-piece pan that is usually in the drawer under your stove. If you don't have one, you can probably use a cookie sheet or something, but I'm not really sure about that. Call someone who's a good cook and ask them what to do.
- Put your oven rack up as high as it will go. Set your oven to broil. My range (which is smarter than I am) has options for low and high broil. Choose low if you have an option. High might dry out your fish. You might think it's a good idea to use the George Foreman grill for this last part, but early tests show that it's no good for the salmon-tot keobs. I'm sure it has plenty of other strengths, but just trust me and stick with the broiler for this one.
- Put your pretty skewers under the broiler (on the broiler pan). I broiled mine for approximately 1½ to 2 minutes per side (there are four sides). So, somewhere around 8 minutes total. Look at them every now and again and decide if they look right to you.
- Serve hot, with PBR.
I think Ore-Ida should hire me to write a tater-tot cookbook.
I made up a little bit of word count today, so that's cool. I've reached the point where I'm just writing any stupid thing that occurs to me, so the whole thread of the thing is falling apart. I don't expect it to get better.
In other news, I am still sorely disappointed by AMC's programming choices. Robocop, Speed, Once Around... These aren't classics. As Dana said, "Speed is hardly even a movie." Have they changed from 'American Movie Classics' to 'American OR Movies OR Classics'?
I've fallen even farther behind in my word count, due to a nasty migraine last night. Ick. I hate migraines. I skipped dinner and went straight to bed at 7:30, so, needless to say, I didn't get much writing done. I did, however, come up with several theories as to why my head hurt so bad, including an alien conspiracy theory, cancer, imminent stroke, and of course, terrorism. Around 3:00am, when I woke up yet again because my head hurt, it seemed very clear to me that someone had poisoned me with whatever kind of poison makes your brain swell up until it explodes. I think it actually exploded around 4:00, and I'm almost back to normal now.
Almost.
Too cheap to call a locksmith? Don't try the chimney.
I have nothing noteworthy to say. Instead, I'll direct you to two links people have sent me lately:
Become Bush's speech writer (from Tracy)
Squirrel terror in Cheshire (from Bret)
Methinks you should all write a haiku on the subject of the squirrel terror story. Something like:
she spins and she screams
a squirrel clamped to her head
"not funny," says friend
The novel writing is tougher than I remembered. It was easy the first couple of days, but I sort of maxed out after 6000 words, and now it's a bit of a struggle. Still, I've only got one pirate reference, so far. I was talking to my mom on the phone today and she was bummed that, out of all the stories she has (most of them rather fascinating, although you're probably not old enough to hear them), she doesn't have any about pirates. She did give me a few other ideas, though; I just have to figure out how to work them into the context of what I've got so far.
My "working title" keeps changing. I'm sticking with lines from Bauhaus songs for now. Maybe, at the end of it all, the title will be "Rotating Bauhaus Lyrics". Maybe I should stop procrastinating and continue writing the darned thing.
Hey, Liz Krueger won, public urination and all. Way to go, Liz!
For a brief summary of how badly things can go wrong in software development, I highly recommend reading Chapter 4 of Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck. Some of my favorite quotes:
There is a human effect from quality. Everybody wants to do a good job and they work much better if they feel they are doing good work. If you deliberately downgrade quality, your team might go faster at first, but soon the demoralization of producing crap will overwhelm any gains you temporarily made from not testing, or not reviewing, or not sticking to standards.
Temporarily sacrificing internal quality to reduce time to market in hopes that external quality won't suffer too much is a tempting short-term play... Eventually, though, internal quality problems will catch up with you and make your software prohibitively expensive to maintain, or unable to reach a competitive level of external quality.
As the saying goes, "Nine women cannot make a baby in one month."
In many ways, cost is the most constrained variable [of cost, time, quality, and scope]. You can't just spend your way to quality, or scope, or short release cycles. In fact, at the beginning of a project, you can't spend much at all.
Chapter 4 sort of explains why I left my last job. Well, some of the reasons. I'm really enjoying the book so far, though. It's a neat view of how software development can work.
Don't forget to vote. I'm mostly saying that so that I don't forget to fill out the ballot that has been sitting on my table, waiting to be filled in and mailed for a couple of weeks now. I'll vote tonight and drop it off tomorrow. Honest.
Novel madness has begun. Disaster struck yesterday when I realized that footnotes aren't included in MS Word's word count. Bastards. If anybody knows how to fix that, let me know. Otherwise, I'll just end up with 90 or so extra words and no more footnotes.
No pirates so far. I'm surprised at this, but certainly not unhappy about it. The words are mostly flowing easily. Well, so far, so good. It's early yet. For the curious, I'm uploading the Word Doc to my web site (mostly just to have a back up copy). If you do read it, please do so with very low expectations.
Hi. I'm still in New Jersey, although I did spend a few days in NYC. I have a stupid cold, so I haven't been feeling all that adventurous, but it has been a good vacation, all in all. In New York, I got to visit with two of my favorite people in the world, and that always feels good. My friend Darby stayed with me in the hotel the first night and we had a great time just eating pizza and making fun of the political ads on TV. The best was a smear campaign against Liz Krueger. Her opponents obviously had a hard time coming up with bad stuff to say about her; the ad went like this:
Voiceover: Liz Krueger voted against measures to curb aggressive pan-handling and public urination.
Woman on street: Public urination? That's disgusting!
Text on screen: Liz Krueger. Public urination. You decide.
I could not stop laughing at the implication that Liz Krueger is pro-public urination. The whole tone of the ad and the way it was done was hilarious, although I'm sure that wasn't the original intent. I decided that if I was in politics, I'd run stupid ads like this against myself to make my opponents look like complete idiots.
Public urination. You decide.
On the political note, there's an ad in New Jersey that ticks me off: it's an old lady saying that she is voting for the Republican candidate because she doesn't think the Democrat will win and she wants her vote to count this time. What a messed up representation of democracy! That's no reason to vote for someone! Politics is messy, messy stuff. I think that's the fundamental problem: the kind of people I would like to vote for are not the kind of people to run for public office. Bummer.
Of course, now it looks like I've spent my entire vacation watching TV. This is not the case at all. Here is a brief summary of some highlights:
- Civil War Recreation (aforementioned)
- Top of Empire State Building (first time)
- B & H Photo Video store
- Went to see The Truth About Charlie, which exactly met expectations and entertainment needs at the time
- Was a hair model for Darby's blow dry class -- she works at a fancy Madison Ave. hair salon, so I got to get a behind-the-scenes peek at that crazy piece of the world
- Got to hang out with Morgan and learn about his job at DC Comics where he works on Batman, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow comics
- My dad came to the city to pick me up and took me to see The Producers (excellent) and then to dinner in Greenwich Village (yummy) and to ride the glass elevators at the Mariott Marquis (goofy, but fun)
- Trick-or-Treating with Tristan and Lyssa (ages 6 and 4)
I'm sure there's more, but it's November, and I've got a novel to write. Ciao.
