violsva

Dear Brain:

Just because it is raining does not mean I have not accomplished anything today.

Did laundry
Said "mm-hm" on the phone with my mother for 20 minutes
Updated wall calendar

Back to work tomorrow, which I suspect may not go well. No sleep last night.

Finished and backed needlepoint from November. Let's see if I can get that here from Tumblr.

( Crappy webcam image )

Cleaned bathroom.
Filled in literal accounting for the last two weeks.
Wrote more than 300 words.
Went out with knumpify and talked about stuff and bought books and felt better about self and work prospects, and may have helped with his stuff a little too.

I feel like I did more than that. Well, woke up at seven, for a start.

Did laundry
Typed up 700 words from dictation night before last
Edited and posted

Title: Chaeronea
Author: Violsva
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Rating: E
Warnings/Enticements: Slash, Colonialism, War, Internalized Homophobia, Swearing, Fighting, Depression and the side effects thereof, Casual Sex, Period-Typical Homophobia, Victorian Attitudes
Word Count: 1719
Summary: What Watson got up to in the army.

At AO3.

Things done today:

Did some research on early 20thC Toronto
Told relatives (the important ones)
Talked to knumpify
Went grocery shopping
Read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Wrote over 600 words

One of the problems with moving out is that I have lost easy access to Mom's recipe for apple crisp, which can be used to make one of the best comfort foods around. So I had to guess at this one, and it worked, so I'm writing it down for times when I don't even have the spoons for experimentation (and I had pretty few spoons this evening as it was).

Take 3 tbsp butter, because that's what was left of the stick. Soften in microwave. Add 4 tbsp flour, 3 tbsp brown sugar, and some cinnamon. Cream together. Maybe a drop of vanilla, too.

Add 1/3 cup rolled oats. Mix.

Slice an apple into really thin, small slices. You could do this into a separate bowl, but I just shove the crisp to one side and then mix it all again afterwards. If it's in a separate bowl, pour on the topping, preferably in layers.

Eat.

Or, you know, you could put it in the oven or something, I guess. Theoretically.

I am having an anxiety upswing because of a lot of things but mostly work, and I spent today happy but with way too much nervous energy. But I have an apartment and my Yuletide assignment as it turns out is an awesome excuse to write the fic I've wanted to write about these characters for more than a year now, and tomorrow there will be steampunk. And tonight there is shortbread, by the following process:


Realize you are hungry. Look in fridge and cupboards. Realize that possibly it's time to go grocery shopping for real, rather than at the Shoppers on the corner.

Poke around on food blogs.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remember that oven cooks hot and lower that a little.

Get out flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and a clementine (because why not, and even though you don't have a reamer it should be manageable).

Measure out half a cup of butter. Drop rest of butter on floor. Blaspheme.

Leave butter alone for a bit to get to room temp.

Add a cup of flour and a quarter cup of sugar and some cinnamon. Break up butter and make piecrust (that is, mash everything with the fork until it's a bunch of little crumbs, with the butter mostly evenly distributed. Or until your arm hurts enough that you say 'screw it' and stop anyway).*

Using another fork and your fingers, inexpertly juice clementine into a saucer until you have about 2 tablespoons or 1/8 cup. Swear never to tell knumpify about this.**

Mush everything together with your fingers. Fingers are necessary here, because the heat helps melt and distribute the rest of the butter. Press into a ball.

Flour the counter. Place dough on the flour. Flatten.

Cut into weird triangular shapes because you don't have any cookie cutters. Arrange on greased baking sheet. Place in oven. Set timer for ten minutes.

Place dishes in sink. Consider dishes. Consider timer. Clean up remaining ingredients and the flour.

Consider dishes. Wash dishes. Rejoice in virtue and the smell of baking cookies.

Take cookies out of oven. Poke. Consider golden brownness (should be very little, just around the edges). Maybe put them back in for two minutes. Leave tray on top of stove for a couple minutes.

Remove cookies to plate. Remove tray and spatula to sink, because the first rule of the kitchen is that there are always more dishes.

Eat.

Having tried them: the orange and cinnamon are more of a suggestion, but they're very good. Hard to go wrong with shortbread.



*This is more formally called 'cutting cold butter into flour' and it is one of the more irritating tasks in baking. People who do it regularly have pastry cutters, but they're hard to clean.
**knumpify reads this blog.

Someone else wrote me a Yuletide story (New Year's Resolution) and it's lovely, a whole bunch of little snippets of Greek women and goddesses. Human Hands Alone by Cirque. Go look!

I've been reading The Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung, and OMG why did no one give me this when I was ten?* I would have loved it. I love it now. It's like Holmes but with more emotion and housebreaking and interesting conflicts of standards and morality. There's good reason for it to be like Holmes - it was written by Doyle's brother-in-law and dedicated to him. And the slash is very nearly on the page.

"In the dark!" said Raffles, as I dragged him in. "Why, Bunny, what's wrong?"

"Nothing - now you've come," said I, shutting the door behind him in a fever of relief and anxiety. ... "I've been thinking of you and nothing else for the last hour."

I'm also reading The Mysteries of Montreal by Charlotte Fuhrer. I was hoping for interesting medical details, of which there are none; instead it's a chatty generally moralizing bunch of short 'I swear its true' stories about the kind of weird stuff people get up to that causes them to need a midwife. Once I realized that I was expecting lots of "and then it turned out she was his father's illegitimate child and they couldn't get married and everyone was miserable," and there was some of that. But there's also stories like the woman who disobeyed her father to marry a man who shortly deserted her, and then moved to Boston and became the mistress of a couple men there and had two children out of wedlock ... and lived happily ever after. The children grew up to be brilliant and accomplished and popular in society, and there were no terrible consequences for the mother except a little social embarrassment. So that was kind of neat. She's funny, too:

Alice was glad to get a husband, and to be independent of her aunt. Mr. Taylor, her husband, was delighted to get such a beautiful and accomplished bride, and the old lady, Alice's aunt, was heartily glad to get rid of them both, so that never was rejoicing more universal.

And I am unstuck on something that was stuck for months, so things are progressing well enough writing wise given the amount of free time I have, which is not much. Apartment hunting is also progressing well, though.

*I know someone who is turning ten this year...

12-4: Insomnia

4-8:30: Fever dreams

8:30-9:30: Staggering around, feeding the cat

9:30: Calling in to work

9:30-11:30: Sleep

11:30: Woken up by boss, who wants me to check something. It takes a full minute before I realize he didn't get my voicemail and thinks I'm at work.

11:30-4: http://xkcd.com/1157/

4: Explaining basics of new desktop shipping program to boss over phone

4-present: Griping


There has been something resembling writing going on as well, at least. I hope I'm better tomorrow, I want to go to work and this is unpleasant. And Monday will be hideous if I don't ship things tomorrow.

It's snowing outside. In mid-April. At least an inch.

But I have a date on Tuesday, and it involves poetry, and I will be better then. Or I damn well plan to be.

My brain, at least, is doing pretty well recently apart from the cold symptoms. No emotional nonsense. Ugh, sick.

Goddamn it body, you are perfectly capable of digesting lactose. You've done it before. Recently.