Tephie's Personal Bombshelter MarkII

Especially amusing if you are a fan of both strains of the crossover.

Q assists with an away party in Equestria (click for full size)



GLaDOS writes to Princess Celestia

I called in today to find out where I could park for jury duty on Monday, if I had to report in (I was planning to wait until after 5 to call, in case it didn't get settled until late this afternoon). I found out how the parking works, which is super easy, but more importantly I found out that ALL my potential trials have been canceled. My service is complete and all I ended up needing to do is to get excused for last Monday since I was in California.

I am feeling a bit at loose ends at the moment... I had a schedule for the next week and a half. :D

As part of my Christmas doings today, I redressed my dolls. I was just going to redress Rico, into clothing she would not like much I admit, but while I had her down and headless I swapped her neck S-hook for Anjeni's (and tried Namid's on her, it's too large for her head). Then, since I had them all down and headless, they all got changed for the holiday.

( Photos under the cut. )

I've tweaked this a bit from the original, and I'm including some tweaks I haven't tried yet but I am certain will work.

You will need a crust for a single crust 9" pie. I like using a shortbread crust for my sweet pies. The recipe makes enough for a double crust 9" pie but it freezes well, so you can save the second half of the dough rather than cutting the recipe.

Since my crust has a lot of butter in it I omitted the one tablespoon of soft butter that the original recipe requires to be rubbed over the crust before filling.

Pie Filling:

¹/₄ c + 1 Tbsp sugar
¹/₂ tsp cinnamon
3 eggs
¹/₂ tsp vanilla
2 c applesauce

Optional crumb topping:

¹/₂ c chopped walnuts
¹/₂ c flour
¹/₃ c brown sugar
3 Tbsp soft butter^*

Preheat your oven to 450°F

Prepare pie filling by blending the sugar and cinnamon together to avoid cinnamon lumps in the finished pie. Beat in eggs, then add the vanilla and apple sauce. Pour into your prepared pie crust. If you aren't using the optional crumb topping, dust the top of the pie with cinnamon.

To prepare the crumb topping combine all ingredients in a small zipper bag (sandwich size works perfectly) and massage until well mixed and crumbly. Sprinkle over the pie filling. Some of it will probably sink into the pie.

Bake the pie at 450°F for 15 minutes.

Reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and bake for 30 additional minutes.

Cool completely before serving.

---

* This is the untested tweak. The original crumb topping recipe called for 1/3 cup of butter. The pie with this butter rich version of the crumble is in the oven right at this moment so I can't tell you if it worked yet, but I think less butter would be better in any case.

I think this one was made possible, or at least much easier, by Scrivener. So when I get my 50% off winner coupon on December 5th I think I'll be using it. :)

For the record, 50,893 words. :D

Given I pretty much started over twice, first by doing a time jump on the main character and then by shuffling chapters, there is a lot of very heavy editing and rewriting needed before this even has a hope of seeing the light of day. I like it. Things I thought to add at the very end of the process (the last three chapters, pretty much) mean I really, really need to rewrite, but I have a much better idea of what I need and what I don't.

The idea I had mid-way through the month, to toss at least three of these characters and the basic set up into my 2009 NaNo story, is still digging at me. Given how much would have to change about them and the situation to make it work I may still do it and keep this story. All the characters would get new names and probably new faces and would end up very different I think.

Remember how I pruned my bookmarks from 3500+ down to under 700? Well thanks to Firefox Sync being stupid they are all back. You see I fired up the laptop, which I forgot was set up to sync, and it put them all back in the version on the sync server, since it does that without asking you if it should even if there are huge discrepancies between the two files. So of course, when I booted up today my desktop synced and FUCK they're all back.

Really, is it so hard to make a sync service that designates one machine as the Master so when you tell it to use that machine's data to overwrite the sync data it then doesn't let the subordinate machines fuck it up?!

I need to go in on the laptop, delete the bookmark file there, and then redo all the bookmark clean up that took me weeks all over again.

Fuck you, Firefox Sync, with a porcupine, sideways.

It's been a while, so NaNo status catch up time.

I didn't write at all the day before Thanksgiving. My motivation hit the dirt and buried itself six feet under. I managed not to let myself fall more than a day behind after that and managed to catch up again on Friday.

Then Kris decided to derail me with my Christmas present. I've posted about that more completely at my "archive dolly stuff" journal on LJ.

For those that don't want to read that, well there are some photos under the cut that will explain things. ( Looky what Kris gave me! )

This is a slightly modified version of a recipe I discovered via Pinterest. I've doubled the amount and adjusted the seasoning.

Note that ¹/₄ cup + 2 Tbsp equals ³/₈ cup, if you are fortunate enough to have a ¹/₈ cup measure.

3 lbs boneless skinless chicken breast cut into 1.5-2" chunks
1 c flour (approximately, for dredging)
vegetable oil for frying

1 can (12 oz) orange juice concentrate
¹/₄ c + 2 Tbsp brown sugar
¹/₄ c + 2 Tbsp ketchup
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 Tbsp salt
¹/₄ tsp red pepper

Dredge the chicken pieces in flour and brown them on all sides. You don't have to cook them through, just get a nice golden brown on them. Put the browned pieces in the crock. Unless you have a much larger pan than I do you'll have to do the chicken pieces in 2-3 batches.

Mix up the other ingredients in a bowl and pour it over the chicken in the crock. Give it a good stir and cook on low for 4-6 hours.

I cooked this batch 6 hours as the recipe stated but I think it would have been fine with just 4 hours. My crock has a notorious hot spot and with all the sugars in this recipe it got a bit dark in places even though I stirred it every couple hours and turned the ceramic liner end for end half way through. It still turned out tasty though. :9

By nine words, but I'll take it. :)

So far I've been meeting the quota every day, though the writing for the most part has not been easy. Today I actually got a good run out of the aftermath of a difficult birth of all things. First I set myself up to write a child and then I toss a birth into the mess. I do have to wonder what my subconscious is up to this year.

I'll be finishing this chapter tomorrow, it needs about another 1300 words, and then I'll be skipping a year and a moon again for the next chapter. I'm a bit more interested in these chapters, Karen is old enough to be a person with a mind I can get into and I have to start working in signs of things to come in order for the last chapter to make sense.

I'm resisting the urge to just jump ahead and write the last chapter even though I've known what will happen in it from the very start. I know if I write the end I won't be interested in going back and filling in the gaps. In fact I may write up to that last chapter and then jump back to write the first chapter, the one that used to be at the end and is therefore blank, before I get to that last chapter. We'll see. If I have enough words to meet the 50k goal in writing the last chapter without writing the blank first chapter I'll go for it. There's enough rewriting to do in the beginning of this thing that I having nothing in that first chapter in the editing stage wouldn't be any worse than not.

It's been a week, I should probably update those of you that care.

When last I wrote on the subject I had mentioned thinking about jumping my key character, Karen, up three years in age. I did do that. Scrivener's index card synopsis feature and document notes made it really easy to just to through and leave myself notes about the new age she should be in each chapter. So I did that on the eighth while finishing up chapter three.

While ending chapter four I noticed something I really should have noticed before NaNo even started. I had misplaced the blue moon. So, after beating my head on the desk for a bit, I went and fixed that. One index card on the cork board dragged from the end of the manuscript to the beginning and then going and readjusting all the ages again took care of the bulk of that. Now I have four chapters to either rewrite or time shift plus one entirely empty new first chapter.

Then, while writing yesterday, I had a flash of either brilliance or insanity. I've been having a lot of trouble writing this story, which is nothing new since I've had that problem with previous NaNo stories, but I have a pretty good idea of why with this one. The first problem I've already addressed some, that's Karen's young age. Shifting her three years older helped but it still means when I go back and rewrite the beginning I'll be writing a four year old. The other is that I'm writing this four (and five, and six, and...) year old child in a world with a level of technology roughly equivalent to the late eighteenth century. Now I don't think I'm quite as badly off as most Americans are with history, and growing up in Massachusetts gives you mandatory history of things like Plymouth, Salem, and field trips to Old Sturbridge Village, but this doesn't help that much about two and a half decades later when you need to know the minutia of daily life in the late 1700s.

So, the flash of possibly insane brilliance... what if I hadn't set this story in the past? What if I had set it in an alternate universe current time? Like I did with my last two NaNo stories (which is probably why I didn't, at least subconsciously). If I did shift it to a "modern" setting, could I make it in the same world as my 2009 NaNo story?

That one, for those that don't want to go looking at my old posts, didn't really gel into a single story. It ultimately fractured into a bunch of flashbacks as I was struggling to get to 50k at the end of the month. I had decided that when I got back to it I would probably break it up into a series of short stories.

I wrote a lot of notes yesterday, about what I would need to do to shift this story into the same world as the one from 2009. There are quite a lot of things that would have to be changed to make it work. The culture between alternate magical late 1700s and alternate magical early 2000s is very different. I wrote down all the ones that came to mind immediately and the wrenches they threw into my plot (I actually have one this year) and some possible solutions.

While I was doing that I was also wondering if I could, or should, introduce these characters to the ones from 2009. That lead to another flash of inspiration and now I have to change Apollonia's career over in the 2009 story. Changing that makes the story that was trying to evolve around her so much easier! It's enough to make me want to beat my head on the desk some more because it was so obvious what her career should have been. Looking back it was really clear that I was subconsciously shoving her in that direction even while I was trying to write her story. So I have a pile of notes about how I need to change her career, and how by doing that I can take those sections of the story that didn't fit together that well and shuffle them around and suddenly it all works.

I think, if I weren't using Scrivener this year I would have had a meltdown over this story. I would either have one long text file with several chunks separated by white space and notes and would have been scrolling through it for ages trying to keep all the notes updated. Or I would have splintered the file into multiple new files and would have had to splice them to do the final word count verification version. Scrivener lets me keep all those outdated bits I wrote in discrete chunks and allows them to be included in word count without forcing them to be in the same file as what I'm working on now. It also lets me write notes and keep them separate from the story. If you hadn't guessed, I really, really like Scrivener. :)

The first one I saw:



Found by Hafoc on LJ.

There is, of course, a pony version:

Well I made it to 10k on Sunday so I'm managing not to fall behind, but I have yet to get a full day ahead at any point (the closest I came to that was the first day).

Yesterday revealed that chapter two will need a complete rewrite, not just heavy editing. This was not surprising really, I knew I was going to be working on that chapter again because it was pretty horrible. Though I didn't think I would be tossing almost the whole thing out. I didn't want to get bogged down there, so I slapped a paragraph about what I needed to change, and some ideas I had to fix things, and continued on with chapter three.

The structure of this novel is both good and bad for me. Good in that I can just slap a paragraph saying "trash this and start over" and jump the year and a moon gap to the next chapter. Bad in that each chapter basically starts "cold" since the last events I wrote about happened a year and moon ago.

At least I can hammer out absolute crap for a chapter, which is "just" 3850 words, and then time jump and try again. In hindsight, I should have thought about significant events to happen in each chapter before I started writing. It would have been easier to do that if I weren't locked into specific months (well, moons, but close enough) for each chapter. It is hard to think of a significant event in, say, May at age two, and then one in June at age three.

I also think that maybe I should have reconsidered the age for Karen. I didn't want her to be any older than 16 at the end, which led me to starting the story with her just a year old (so she would end the story at thirteen) but I'm thinking now that maybe I should have started her at age four so she would end at sixteen, just so I wouldn't have to write a small child for so long. I have zero experience in raising small children (or not so small children for that matter) so I've added an extra burden or research to my writing this year.

Perhaps I'll switch gears, after this chapter, and jump her age up. I know I'll be rewriting these first chapters anyway since chapter one had its own problems and chapter two is set to basically be rewritten entirely anyway. I could probably shift chapter three by three months and make it the new chapter one. I suppose I will decide that when I get to the end of this chapter.

I could write my last chapter now and get ahead in the word count, Scrivener's work flow makes that ridiculously easy, but since that's the only chapter where I know what I am going to write I'm saving it for the rush to the end.

And now I should settle in to write my 1667 minimum for today.

I was in the mood for "bread baked with stuff on it" so I played around with a recipe and came up with this.

I use a bread machine to make the dough.

1 c warm water
2 Tbsp olive oil
¹/₂ tsp salt
2 tsp minced garlic
1 Tbsp rosemary (I used dried, but you could use fresh)
3 c flour
1¹/₂ tsp dry active yeast

The resultant dough will be very soft and a bit sticky, so lightly flour your sheet pan and your hands before turning it out. I like to line my sheet pan with a piece of non-stick foil.

Give the dough a couple turns on the floured surface and pat it out into a rough 13x9" rectangle. Poke it with your fingertips to dimple the surface. At this point you can top it with whatever you like. I gave it a light coat of olive oil (spray, but you could brush it), some grated paremesan/romano/asiago blend, sliced black olives, and shredded colby.

Set in a warm spot to rise about 30 minutes, I heat my oven to about 80°F before I turned out the dough and then turned it off. By the time I was done slicing the olives it was just a bit warmer than the kitchen so I left the bread in the oven with the door ajar to rise.

Heat the oven to 400°F (remove the bread if you were rising it in there) and bake the bread for 20-25 minutes.

The result has a nice crisp crust and a fluffy interior. I may use this as a base for a bready pizza crust in the future.

11/16/11 - This makes excellent pizza crust. Just top it and bake it without letting it rise.

I know, you're all excited by both of those topics. ;)

I finally managed to get a spot of Not Raining to get some photos of my doll knitting.

First up, that doll shawl that has been done and blocked for months. It's been waiting so long for a photo it almost needs to be blocked again.



( Two more photos under the cut, one is not the shawl again. )

I'm almost a full day ahead on my word count already with 3101 words right now.

This year I actually have a planned story structure, a beginning scene, an ending scene, and signposts at specific points in time to stop and write. We'll see if this makes things easier or not when I'm further along.

Another new thing for this year is that I'm not writing one big plain text file with nothing but multiple returns or scene dividers to break things up. This year I have the trial for the Windows version of Scrivener running. (Thank you clare_dragonfly for letting me know there was a Windows beta!) The plan is to win NaNo and use the 50% off coupon I will earn to actually buy this software. Last month I spent some time importing my old NaNo stories into Scrivener and even just using it for editing like that made me want it.

( A lot of babbling and some screen caps under the cut. )

Goodness I got wordy. Pity it wasn't novel content. :)

Peter S. Beagle spoke at Anthrocon about how he did a set of stories based on the seasons, each story used the same characters and advanced one year and one season from the one before. I thought that was a very cool idea. So I tried to think of other things that came in "sets" like the seasons so that I could use them as a theme to link stories/chapters/scenes together that way.

One of my old art idea files had an entry about using the names of full moons for a set of drawings. So that's the set I've been poking at, thirteen named moons. Each section of my NaNo would be about four thousand words built around the name of a full moon, progressing in order.

After visiting Wikipedia for a list of full moon names, I tried picking out which names I wanted to use. That has turned out a bit harder than I had expected. I don't want to repeat names, and I prefer the names be somewhat poetic (Moon Before Yule is not making muster). At the moment I'm contemplating two names per moon for most of them, and I haven't decided which moon to start with nor what season to place the blue moon in. I have a loose idea of trying to make time pass in the story so that it takes a (lunar) year and a day.

As you can see, the idea is very vague.

So, anyone have some ideas to toss into the mix? Or a suggestion of something else that comes in a "set" that I could use rather than full moons? I considered astrological signs and think the Chinese would be easier to work with than the western but writing twelve animal themes might be a bit monotonous.

Is more like a foot hill now. When I started my pruning project I had over 3500 bookmarks and now I have "just" 862. I'm sure I'll eventually cut out some more, but I'm feeling pretty satisfied with my progress.

Yes, I plan to do it again. I even have a vague idea to work from. Very vague. I still have time though, so I'm not worried about that yet.

This will be my sixth NaNo. I've noticed some trends in my NaNo experiences that are rather depressing. It gets harder every year for one. Here's a bit of a review of the experiences: ( This ended up rather long. )


So in the end it boils down to this:

• Unless I have a really good idea I'm going to be whiny and complain a lot.


• Even with a good idea I'm still going to whine.


• When the writing goes well, it will go very well.


• When it goes badly, it can go very, very badly.


• I can, if pressed, knock out about seven thousand words in a day.


• I am much more comfortable getting a day or two of buffer built up and sticking between fifteen hundred and two thousand words.


• When I'm stuck, add more characters or split them up so I have more than one location to write about.


• If the story just will not move I'm probably pushing in the wrong place.


• In general, the less I post the worse it's going.

I heard about it months ago, but at the time I didn't see much use for it. The person that showed it to me was using it as a collaborative idea board and, at that time, it wasn't very friendly to someone just looking around to see what it was all about.

Pinterest has gotten over that little problem. I've only had an account for about a day and a half and I have ten boards and sixty seven pins. I'm sure I will have more by the time I go to bed tonight.

See, I have had this huge bookmark file that I've moved from browser to browser and PC to PC for about fifteen years. It had more than 3500 bookmarks before I ran my latest "find me all the dead links so I can dump them" tool (Check Places add-on for Firefox). Sadly, an automated pruning program doesn't help as much these days as it did years ago, too many domains get parked and links redirect rather than nicely returning a 404 or other useful error codes. So I've been manually cleaning up after the first rough pass and dumping bookmarks left and right. I still have in excess of 2300 of them though.

What does this have to do with Pinterest and my obsession with it? Well that has to do with how I ended up with so many bookmarks in the first place. I wasn't just bookmarking interesting sites, I was bookmarking interesting pages, or even parts of pages. Basically one bookmark per idea rather than overall concept. I don't think I was the only one doing this.

Pinterest gives me a place to put all those "ooh, shiny!" moments without having to add a bookmark into an increasingly convoluted set of folders. Granted, at the moment I'm still sorting out my boards, which are enough like folders that I'm sure they'll multiply like proverbial rabbits, and some things I'd like to put on more than one board, which you can't do right now (maybe in the future... I can hope), but it does give me a nicely laid out visually oriented way to see all those neat things. So the bookmark file is shrinking to things I actually use and all those "hey, that's a cool use for an old light globe and a half burned out string of Christmas lights", "that recipe looks tasty", and "cool, living bridges!" bits are getting pinned.

Of course looking at what other people are pinning is also helping my boards fill... but at least they aren't adding more bookmarks because I just repin them to one of my boards.

Currently if you request an invitation at the site you'll probably get one in under 12 hours (I did). Or you can drop me your email and I can send one to you. If I'm online (which, lets face it, I usually am if I'm not sleeping) you'll get it faster, and you'll probably be linked up as my friend automatically rather than having to hunt me down (I'm Tephra there).

One downside, you are required to have a Facebook or Twitter account to sign up even if you have an invitation. They use that to give you a seed set of people to watch. You can remove those people, and disassociate your account, once your account is created.

I really should make a point of posting something on a regular basis outside of the month of November.

Looking back, my last post was in mid-July. Well since then I went and visited family for most of the month of August. There isn't much to say about that other than I figured out that setting up a wireless router with Verizon's DSL is not as straight forward as you would think. But I did it, and after that point I had a nice connection to use the laptop with and did not have to borrow my brother's PC to get online.

Mom waffled on getting herself a laptop again. I told her my first day there that if she wanted one we should pick it out early in my visit. So of course she decides to seriously consider it the day before I planned to leave. Ultimately she opted not to, but I half expect a phone call where she says she bought one and needs help setting up everything (and I do mean everything, the closest she's come to having a computer is an electronic typewriter).

So I guess this is where I bore all of you with knitting. ( Cut for images and length. )

I really do need to post more often. *whew*