author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It's summer and I feel like Calvin of "and Hobbes" fame. "The days are just packed!" Today I was running around barefoot all over my neighborhood, wading in Wonderland Creek, and fishing for crawfish, honest to any God you care to name. I pretty much spent today being twelve years old.

What happened was, Saturday I biked to The Goat at the Garage, which is a cafe about 15 minutes east of me. (It gets its name from sharing a building with Green Eyed Motors.) There I geared up to roller skate the trails with some friends. We skated the Boulder Creek Path across town and across two zip-codes, from the 80301 post office to the downtown farmer's market. It was pretty epic. After all that, of course, I still had to bike, and I had to get groceries. So I wound up biking home along 30th Street and the Wonderland Creek Path with my baskets full to bursting with milk, potato chips, bread, soda, and assorted stinky-sweaty skate gear.

It was during the final part of this ride that I ran into the group of guys crawfishing in Wonderland Creek. They were leaning over the railing at the little flat bridge, dangling what looked like very long shoelaces into the water. I trundled to a stop and wobbled around a U-turn with my overladen bike and came in close to investigate. They proudly showed me an assortment of plastic containers containing crawfish sorted by size. The largest probably came up to around six inches in length. All in all they had about 30.

"Do you lower one of those bins in on a line with bait inside, and then haul up the bin once they crawl in?"

"No," the nearest guy said, with an almost embarrassed expression, "it's just some turkey knotted into the end of the line. They hold onto it while we pull it up."

The simplicity of it! Also the familiarity--I remembered a fishing trip one summer when we caught not a single fish on the line, but kept finding small blue crabs clinging defiantly to the bait. "What are you going to do with them?"

Another shrug. "Throw 'em back."

I was thinking, Throw them back? What a waste! You've got enough for crawfish monica at least for two, right? But I just nodded and wished them luck. The rest of my ride home, though, I was also thinking, Why didn't I think of that?

So today was Monday, and Mondays are often how I steal back a weekend day that roller derby stole from me in the first place. (Yesterday wasn't a team practice day like usual, but only because it was the league's first annual carnival fund-raiser. I made cotton candy and snow-cones all day. Meanwhile, John ran around playing all the games and eating cotton candy and snow-cones. Yesterday was John's day to be twelve years old.) So having an unscheduled weekend day on my hands, I experimented.

Experiment #1 involved finding a good place to drop my line. I didn't want to hang around on the bridge where everyone passing by would wonder what I was up to. That works fine if you're with your best buds and you have great results to show-off, but I was all alone and I didn't know what I was doing. So I made my way downstream a bit. I figured I was looking for somewhere with shadowy pockets where a crawfish might hide, and lots of little minnows that a crawfish might hunt. Places just downstream of small "waterfalls" seemed to be most likely. A place where I actually saw a crawfish hanging out in the shallows seemed ideal.

Experiment #2 was about setting up my line. I brought some pieces of raw bacon and a ball of twine. After some initial false starts having to do with dropping my ball of twine in the creek and having to jump in after it (the creek's not even knee-deep, but jumping in disturbs all the critters) and indeed dropping my miniature ice-chest in and thus freeing my first catch of the day, I settled into a routine that seemed to work.

1. Tie bacon to end of twine.
2. Tie a rock just above that, to pull the bacon down to the creek bottom.
3. Tie this to a longish stick, to allow greater flexibility in dropping the line.
4. Prop the stick on the bank and shorten the twine so that the twine is taut.
5. Repeat with additional bait-twine-rock-sticks.
6. Relax with a book and/or some tatting and wait for one of your lines to twitch.
7. Carefully pull up line, hoping crawfish doesn't let go until it's over the bank.
8. Pick up crawfish and toss it into the ice chest.
9. Repeat from step 4.

If you don't mind spending a little while at it, you can catch a good handful that way. I got seven over the course of an hour or so--sometimes two at a time. (These are featured in the crappy cell phone photography above.) Probably would have got more over the same period had I dropped my lines by the bridge, but, again, I wanted a more secluded spot.

Experiment #3 was to eliminate the part where sometimes the crawfish gets wise to you and lets go before you get him onto the bank. We have this three-tiered hanging wire mesh basket that we used for storing and showing off tea at the old house. At the new place, we never found a place to hang it up, nor a use for it since all our tea fits in kitchen drawers now, so it's been on a shelf in the laundry room all this time. I thought about it today when I considered what might work as a sort of net.

It worked pretty well. I used a twist-tie to secure some bacon to the center of the top basket, then attached some twine to the hanging chain and hook. I let it sink to the bottom of my most productive fishing hole, where it settled flat. I tied the twine to a handy root on the bank, then I settled down to pass the time with Cherie Priest's Boneshaker and a tatting motif I wanted to finish. Periodically I'd get up and take a look: the basket, painted white, shone clearly up through the shadowy two-foot-deep water. It was easy to see when a crawfish had crawled onto it. I pulled on the line, the basket expanded into three dimensions as it rose off the creek floor, and the crawfish stayed in the basket. (Seriously, that sucker clung to the basket. It took a fight to get it to let go of the wire.)

I now have ten of 'em in the fridge and mean to try one more quick trip tomorrow morning. The plan is to then make a very simplified version of this crawfish bisque recipe.

In the near future, there may be an Experiment #4, involving a DIY crawfish trap made from two 2-liter bottles. That may, however, be too much work for a temporary 12-year-old like myself.

So sometimes Mondays aren't for getting things done. Sometimes Mondays are for recovering from the weekend. I had a very full weekend, and, considering Monday is not a work day under my current schedule, I spent most of today luxuriating in not having to get out of bed.

That said, I really wish my favorite self-indulgent "Not being productive today, thanks" activity, that of alternately napping and devouring books whole, didn't universally result in headaches and cricks in my neck. There's no right posture, no correct amount of pillows, no position whatsoever that's comfortable for long or doesn't result in the abovementioned afflictions if I fall asleep. I think this must be one of those "getting older" things, along with taking longer to heal from minor injuries and not being able to make it through the night without an extra bathroom visit. Dammit.

But I went to the Rush concert Saturday night! That was awesome. Lots of great music, good humor, lovely memories, a stage design that was itself worth the price of admission, all of it only made a little bittersweet by having gone alone to what was likely to be the band's last tour "of this magnitude". Besides, I wasn't entirely alone--I spent a small amount of the second half tweeting back and forth with an old high school friend who'd seen the tour a few stops earlier, so I had someone to share happy thoughts with during the concert after all. Yay!

So that was awesome. And since that's all I really have to report today--here's a recipe! There may be no writing content in today's actually writing blog, but, darn it, you get a recipe. I call it...

"Wait, This Isn't Shakshuka, What Is This Mess?"

I'm a heedlessly adventurous cook. I will throw things together that do not go together, just because the thought of them together sounds good in my mouth. It is a good thing that I am also an extremely non-picky eater. If the experiment had gone poorly, I would probably have eaten it almost as happily as if it went well. As it turned out, the experiment went rather well. It made a dinner that was almost as deliciously self-indulgent as today's reading-in-bed session was.

Defrost and brown a pound of bulk (not link) sausage. I used breakfast sausage, but anything would do, really. Ground beef would have been fine too. Anyway, while it's browning, chunk and crumble it up as best you can. You aren't going to need to drain the oil. Well, you can if you like. I don't.

Chop up and toss in all the tomatoes burning a hole in your fridge. Between a friend's contribution to the housewarming potluck feast and my husband's experiments with pizza, there were a bunch of tomatoes in the refrigerator, in danger of being forgotten until they composted themselves. This was the main reason this meal happened, actually. "Oh, Gods, I have to use up those tomatoes. Why don't I simmer them with sausage and... oh! with some of that kimchi that I also need to use up?" I have thoughts like that. There may be something wrong with me.

Add a generous portion of kimchi. I am guilty of having about four different half-ful jars of kimchi in the fridge at any given time. Look, they're all different kimchi, OK? After a tour of the available varieties, my nose told me I should use the classic daikon kimchi from MMLocal. It smelled slightly sweeter and less sour than the others, thus matching the flavor profile my mind was reaching for when it said, "Let's put those tomatoes in with some sausage and kimchi."

But wait! It gets better.

Add the juice of half an orange, which also needed using up. These were leftover from another of my husband's cooking projects, tofu marinated in orange juice and soy sauce, then baked until delicious. He bought rather more oranges than he needed, and I keep forgetting they're there. I do not know why I looked at tomatoes, sausage, and kimchi, and said to myself, "This needs orange juice." I may be a genius. A very strange genius.

Add a handful of basil, because there's some in the garden on the back porch, and because when orange juice and tomatoes are on the stove, they obviously need basil. That's the herb that goes into the orange juice tomato soup I make for Winter Solstice, from the Cooking Like a Goddess cookbook.

And also a generous splash of fish sauce, because you already put kimchi in there, so what have you got to lose?

Simmer, stirring often, until the sausage looks fully cooked. Then, because the sight of sausage simmering in juices with vegetables reminds you of that time you attempted (with some success) to make shakshuka, even though this dish really doesn't resemble shakshuka at all, considering the kimchi and orange juice and the total lack of cumin or paprika, crack a couple eggs on top of the mess. Do not stir from here on out. You're going for poached, not scrambled.

When the eggs are done to your taste, spoon them out into a bowl along with a heaping helping of the juicy sausage-tomato mixture that they poached in. Then exercise supreme restraint and same the rest to eat later, probably over pasta shells.

OK, so, Pot Pie Calzones. These are something you might do if you have leftover pizza dough and would like to use it up in a non-pizza kind of way. Mine were carnivorous, but yours don't have to be. This is a very flexible sort of use-up-the-leftovers meal.

Here's the short story version: Take sufficient pizza dough as for an individual-sized pizza. Roll it out just as thin as you can make it. Cut it into two pieces. Drape these in/over two mini-loaf pans. Fill with some kind of filling. Fold the ends of the dough over the top. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes. Eat one "calzone" hot today and the other cold tomorrow.

Here's the longer story.

John's been doing a lot of cooking lately, which makes me very happy and also well-fed. For our housewarming party, he made a large batch of pizza dough and offered to make pizzas on demand for anyone who asked for one. No one took him up on it, possibly because there was also red beans & rice, orange baked tofu, stuffed mushroom caps (contains dairy), sauteed mushrooms (contains no dairy), cookies, cherry tomatoes, a watermelon, potato chips, and I forget what else. (I bought some andouille sausage to serve as an optional side to the red beans & rice. What with the rest of the menu, I forgot to take them out of the refrigerator, and wound up eating them all by myself alongside homemade creamed corn. I WIN AT DINNER. Also, I saved the drippings, because I'm from the south and it's, like, a rule.)

So a couple days later, John made pizzas for the two of us for lunch. Which was delicious and induced serious food coma--but it did not use up all the dough. He was all set to throw out the remaining two lumps ("It's only good for six days or so, and I'm not going to make pizza again that soon") but I wouldn't hear of it. "I'll use it up somehow," I said.

A week passed. "Will you please use that dough?" "Oh, right, yeah. Will do! Any minute now."

Finally, I took one of the two lumps, worked it into as thin a sheet as I could (it is important to let the dough warm to room temperature before attempting this! Trust me), and draped it over a single normal-sized loaf pan. Into this "deep dish pizza" cavity I stuffed a stuffing which involved

• a quarter onion, chopped, sauteed
• one pound ground beef, browned
• the leftover non-dairy sauteed mushrooms from the party
• gravy made with the reserved drippings from the andouille sausage
• enough frozen peas to comprise a comfort food ratio

And baked this as described above.

It was delicious. Only problems were, the middle tended to fall apart due to its high volume-to-surface-area ratio, and I didn't know when to stop eating. I damn near devoured it all before I realized I was ready to burst. Between that and a bottle of beer, I was down for the count.

Next night, I did it again, only in two mini-loaf pans instead of a single normal loaf pan. And the filling was much more simple: a pound of bulk italian sausage, gravy made from the drippings left in the pan after browning the sausage, and more frozen peas. The results were much less unwieldy and, very importantly, included a natural stopping point. I ate one of the resulting "calzones" on a plate with knife and fork and put the other away. That one (pictured here) I ate tonight, cold, with my hands, over a plate.

(Leftover pot pie calzone tonight because the Bombshells footage-watching party had to be rescheduled. Vegan dal and curry paneer will happen some other night. Not sure when, but it'll be soon.)

One last snafu: You can see in the photo how I rolled up the dough on the long sides of the pan, right? OK. Don't do that. The resulting extra-thick ridge of dough was difficult to chew and almost impossible to cut without smooshing the loaf. Probably better off to just lay the excess flat in layers rather than try to make fancy edging.

And that's the story of Pot Pie Calzones. Go forth and enjoy with whatever filling your tummy most desires.

I've got more recipes to share! Why? Because I win at leftovers, and that is a fine, fine feeling.

I've also got this month's Fictionette Freebie for everybody. I decided on "You Could Go a Long Way in Shoes Like Those" because I think it's funny and I wanted to show it off in full. You can download the PDF ebooklet or the MP3 audiofictionette, be you subscriber or no, just as you please. Enjoy!

OK, so. Recipes! Here we go. Today, it's How to Make Paneer Without Making a Mess.

This is not originally my recipe. It isn't even a recipe, no more than instructions on how to turn cream into butter is a recipe. (Step 1: Put heavy whipping cream in a sealed container. Step 2: Shake container until the contents are no longer sloshing. You've got whipped cream. Step 3: Shake container some more until contents are sloshing again. You've got butter and buttermilk.) Paneer is just a form of fresh house cheese, which is to say, curds separated out of milk. You can find out how to make it on the internet. So did I! I follow the instructions linked from a Tea & Cookies blog post from June 2007. (I also use the Tea & Cookies recipe for saag paneer. It's the best.)

But I have also developed a method that makes it less of a pain in my butt.

But first--why do I make paneer when I can easily buy it in the store? Well, for one thing, it's very satisfying to make my own. For another, I'm terribly prone to letting the better part of a half-gallon of milk go to waste. I do not want to waste milk! Thus I make cheese.

The main innovation: I no longer boil the milk in a pot over direct heat. I got heartily sick of scraping burnt milk solids off the pan when I was done, see. Now I take my biggest stainless steel pot, and I fill it with enough water such that when I nest the next biggest pot inside it, the nested pot's bottom is only barely submerged. Milk goes in the nested pot, of course, with a lid on top to keep the heat in. Then I turn the heat to full boil and I just walk away.

Well, not too far. But from my desk in the office I can easily hear when the water in the big pot reaches full boil. It sounds weirdly like footsteps. The milk, meanwhile, not being over direct heat, isn't quite so prone to froth over and make a mess on the stove. It will also leave no worse mess in the pot than a ring of (unburnt) curd crumbs that I can knock off in seconds with a sponge.

(Caution: If water keeps slopping over the side once it's boiling, take the milk pot out of the boiler pot, then take a sturdy coffee mug and scoop out about half a cup of water. Replace the milk pot. Repeat until water no longer slops over the side.)

Milk reaches boil, lemon juice goes in, stir stir stir, strain. For straining, I use clothespins to secure a folded-over piece of cheesecloth to the top of my largest resealable leftovers container--the square-bottomed tall one I call my "soup tupperware." This is for retaining the whey. I don't like the whey to go to waste, either. (Note to self: Acquire more recipes that use whey. Besides roti.)

Drip drip drip squeeeeeeze, OK, now what? Now I have two smaller resealable containers--I think they came in a Ziplok set of four--ready to mold the cheese. It's important that they be identical, because what happens next is I nest the containers one inside the other with the cheese in between them. Very important to note that the cheese remains wrapped in cheesecloth! The cheesecloth helps wick away excess water, and it also makes it easier to extract the cheese from the mold. So the cheese-molding sandwich, from bottom to top, goes like this: Container, cheesecloth, cheese, cheesecloth, container, milk jug filled with water (better compression through gravity!). Then the whole shebang goes into the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning, the paneer comes out the cheesecloth, gets wrapped in Press-and-Seal or plastic wrap, then sealed inside a gallon-size freezer bag, then put in the freezer. Eventually I'll feel I've accumulated enough to make saag paneer with, and that's a happy day.

That's what usually happens, anyway. This week, however, the paneer is just going in the refrigerator. My roller derby team is coming over to watch film of our most recent game, and the paneer's going into my potluck contribution. My plan is to fry the paneer in ghee and add it to some sort of curry. I'm also going to cook up a big pot of vegan red lentil dal and a batch of rice. HUNGRY ALREADY.

Tomorrow I shall share the other recipe I'm quite pleased with, the one that made me say "I win at leftovers." I'm calling it Pot Pie Calzones. Stay tuned.

A recipe! Which epiphanized out of a conversation on the drive home from roller derby practice. Sort of a rolling sequence of epiphanies: "Oh, yeah! Shepherd's pie! That exists, doesn't it? Such that I can actually make it! Hey! I actually have all the ingredients at home right now! I am so very much making it tonight."

OK, well, I did not in fact have mutton on hand. I had ground beef. Perfectly acceptable.

The rest of the conversation involved us collaborating on a recipe, which I proceeded to polish into practicality the moment I got home. It wound up going something like this:

About a pound of russet potatoes. Put them in to boil. Their fate is to be mashed.

1 pound ground beef. Defrost it in the microwave. (I have a microwave now. Haven't had one in about 15 years.) Brown in a pan. No oil or butter - just let its own juices do the work. When there's only a small amount of raw pink left, remove the meat to another container, leaving the fatty juices in the pan.

1 medium onion, or half a large one. 3 ribs celery. Sautee these in the burger juices until soft and, optionally, caramelized around the edges.

A good handful parsley, chopped. A good fingerful minced garlic out the jar. Splashes soy sauce, worchestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar to taste. Salt and pepper to taste. Stir into the ground beef while the aromatics are sauteeing.

About as many frozen peas as looks right when you mix it into the ground beef mixture. Probably about a cup. If it looks like it needs more, add more. You know what kind of peas-to-meat ratio you like. Make it happen.

Three scallions, chopped. Heavy whipping cream as needed for creamy texture. However much shredded parmesan cheese you like. Another good fingerful of minced garlic. These are what go into the potatoes, when you mash your potatoes. Well, when I mash my potatoes, anyway. I leave the skins on, by the way.

Spread meat mixture in an even layer on bottom of 9 x 13 baking pan. Pyrex-style is best; you want to be able to see through the sides. Spread mashed potatoes in an even layer on top. Make fun designs in the top of the mashed potatoes with a fork.

Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes or until it's been bubbling up from the bottom of the pan for a good few minutes. (This is why I like see-through baking pans.)

Move pan to top rack, set oven to a high broil, and broil for about 5 minutes or until the mashed potatoes have got a nice golden-brown crust on them. This will make your fun fork designs stand out nicely.

Let cool for about ten minutes or until you can't stand it anymore. Devour. Accompany with a delicious dark beer if you do that sort of thing. I do that sort of thing. It's a Tommyknocker Cocoa Porter.

I'm full of the how-tos this week! Tatting instructions on Monday, and now on Wednesday, a recipe.

Here's the set up: First off, I'm a roller derby skater and I tend to come home SUPER ATHLETE HUNGRY from practice. Secondly, one of my teammates is a farmer. Actually, more than one, but right now I'm specifically talking about the skater who raises pigs. Mainly she breeds them for shows, but when their breeding and show careers come to an end, their ultimate destiny is sausage. The sausage's ultimate destiny is in the bellies of hungry skaters and their families and friends.

(She also raises rabbits, the meat of which she sells to local restaurants. And also to you, if you want some. I acquired a 3-pounder and modified a gumbo z'herbes recipe into a rabbit & andouille gumbo this past winter. It was amazing.)

Tonight, after a particularly hard-working Bombshells practice, I wrote out my check and picked up my order of ten pounds breakfast sausage and ten pounds Italian sausage When I got home, 19 pounds of sausage went into the freezer, and one pound Italian sausage went into the microwave to defrost.

Here's what happened next:

• Melt two tsp butter in medium sauce pan over medium-high heat.
• Brown defrosted sausage in the butter.
• Add half an onion, chopped into rings, and cook until soft and semi-translucent.
• Stir in:
  • two tsp flour
  • a generous soup spoon of MMLocal pear-sauce (applesauce would have worked fine)
  • a generous coffee spoon of Dijon mustard
• Pour in the better part of a bottle of dark beer. I had a bottle of Uinta Organic Baba Black Lager hanging around that I wasn't looking forward to drinking because it's a tad too bitter for my tastes. It went into the pot.
• Reduce heat and allow to simmer until broth is thick and/or you just can't stand it anymore.

I am devouring the results with a spoon. It is ambrosia. A more patient and/or less hungry Fleur de Beast might have let the broth thicken to a sauce consistency and then made sloppy joes for dinner. Unfortunately, there are no hamburger or hot-dog buns in the house, and I'm both impatient and hungry. Thus the spoon.

I suspect food coma will set in good and hard after I'm done with my spoon and my sausage. Therefore, good night!

It's Friday, so I have done my duty. Again, it is ridiculously late in the day. It almost isn't Friday at all. But the Fictionette is up, and you can see its stats at left and its cover image at right. Excerpt is here, downloadable PDF available to Patrons pledging $1/month is over here. It's horror again, but more of a lighthearted piece of horror than last week's Fictionette. Of course horror can be lighthearted. Think Good Omens and that gut-churning scene with the telemarketers. Well, I was thinking about it. It probably shows.

Yesterday I expressed a hope that my energy level would continue at yesterday's highly productive rate; it did not. Not that I was entirely unproductive, mind you. John and I met the realtor at a nearby property viewing--not because we seriously thought we might jump on something now, but to give the realtor more of an idea of what we liked and what we didn't and what we'd settle for and what were dealbreakers. It was pleasantly close to our current neighborhood, it was huge, it came with a lower H.O.A. fee that neveretheless covered more features, and it had a wood fireplace. These are pluses. On the minus side, it was expensive (as you might imagine, given the size), it was oriented for east/west light rather than north/south, and it had a rather claustrophobic if well furnished kitchen.

Then we went to McGuckin for the polyurethane I need to put a sealant coat on the newly stained kitchen cabinets and panels. Then I went downtown to pick up the remainder of our MMLocal share. Then we came home and I put the final coat of paint on one of the office closet door bifolds.

So I guess it's OK that I fell over for a three-hour nap at that point.

I may have mentioned that I've purchased a destuckification product from The Fluent Self recently? Right. Well, the physical item has yet to come in the mail - it sounds like Havi had post office bureaucracy nightmares which I wouldn't wish on anyone - but I have received the ebook component. The ebook is her Book of Rally Keys (BORK) and I spent about an hour or two reading it last night when I should have gone to sleep already. It is getting into my brain in healthy ways.

One of the healthy ideas that BORK has put in my brain is the idea that naps aren't something to be ashamed of. They can be expressions of terrified avoidance, or they can be expressions of the need for replenishment; in either case, they're entirely natural and they indicate a need. I expect after yesterday and this afternoon my need was very great. So I'm practicing being gentle with myself and accepting my need to nap.

There was another BORK/Fluent Self idea I wanted to mention, but it escapes me at the moment. So I'll let it run free for now, trusting that it will come home again and let me turn it into a blog post sometime soon.

Meanwhile, I have just finished eating the entire jar of Pears With Rosemary, and, now that we're all going to bed and will therefore be unlikely to absentmindedly lean against various kitchen surfaces, I am going to paint polyurethane on various kitchen surfaces.

As expected, I did not skate at BCB's first practice in the "Barn Shelter" tonight. As expected, this made me sad. So I am thinking of cheerful things, so as to keep the sad away.

Some immediate cheerful things are right here on the desk with me. They are a bottle of beer and a bowl of pasta. Tasty things to eat and drink are inherently cheerful. They add cheerfulness to the sum of cheerfulness at the cheerful end of the cheerful/not-cheerful see-saw. What I'm saying here is, even if you're not all that happy, treating your tummy and tastebuds to something yummy is an easy, no-effort way to increase your happy points score, if only by a little.

Some cheerful things happened today. John and I went to see Into the Woods at the Cinnebar in Louisville. Being somewhat familiar with the musical, I was worried there might be an excess of Disneyfication in the film adaptation. It turns out there was not. With regards to Act II, Disney did not flinch. Oh, the body count is slightly lower, but mostly that's because the character count is too. Where in one really notable case they spared a main character's life, it was very much not to make a happier ending. It arguably made another character's ending that much more tragic. (Yes, I'm circumlocuting. I'm spoiler-adverse. Go see the movie.)

More importantly: the adaptation is really good. It's faithful to the feel of a Broadway musical, not just in preserving the score but also in preserving the sense of limitations in what you can show onstage. Which is not to say that they didn't take advantage of the possibilities of film, but rather that the choices they made were artful and wise.

Some cheerful things had to do with writing! For the first time since October, I put up a post on Boulder Writing Examiner. Yes, my Examiner gigs are supposed to be at a much lower priority than my fiction. It's not meant to be a huge deal. But after two months without a single post on BWE (and barely anything on Puzzle Pirates Examiner other than the obligatory weekend blockade round-ups), it feels triumphant. Like waving a flag and shouting, "Not dead yet!"

I also finally put up all the accompanying material for last week's Friday Fictionette. The Wattpad version of the teaser is up, as are the excerpt and cover notes posts on Patreon. Woot! Just in time to swing into action on this week's edition.

And some cheerful things are coming soon in the future. As you know, I have been reading and thinking about the wisdom of Havi Brooks quite a lot lately. And one of my thoughts was, "It's a brand new year. It's been a while since I purchased a Fluent Self product and made myself feel happy and creative and productive thereby. Maybe it's time." Right on cue, Havi announced a New Year's "Plum Duff Days" half-off sale! So I ordered myself a copy of the DIY Rally/Retreat kit, which will arrive any day now.

By stunning coincidence, the DIY Rally/Retreat kit includes a 2015 calendar. I was just thinking I'd like a new wall calendar...

Anyways, it appears that Plum Duff Days continue through January 19th. For information on that, read a recent post by Havi (this'll do nicely) and look for the Plum Duff link and password.

Yet more cheerful future things: "Broken Bombers Trivia" tomorrow night (a group of BCB skaters, the core of whom are on injury league of absence, show up for Geeks Who Drink and rock the house), me getting back on skates very carefully on Thursday night, the knee brace that a league member loaned me for my sprain recovery, the fact that I'm almost done my writing for the day and can play on Puzzle Pirates for a bit before bedtime, a whole new day full of possibilities will begin when I wake up tomorrow...

My! The world is full of cheerful things. I am a very lucky person!

Hello! I am posting this from Memphis. I am on the train, and the train is arriving in Memphis. And I have almost completely recovered from my latest bout of pre-travel freak-outs!

Because pre-travel freak-out mode happens at the end of a vacation, too. I've got a train to catch, I've got to be ready to leave by 12:30, I've got stuff needs doing before then. Thus: Panic!

But it's inevitably going to be less freaky than the freak-out at the start of a vacation. It's the return journey, so the potential for freak-out is limited. I'm no longer planning what to pack; I mostly just have to make sure that everything I brought, plus the few things I've acquired, all make it into my luggage. And I don't have to clean the fridge or make sure all the leftovers are eaten or frozen, since the house we're leaving is inhabited. It's inhabited by people who might end up throwing out those leftovers in a week's time (sorry, Dad), but there is at least a non-zero chance that they will eat them.

So aside from packing, here's what was on my to-do list:

• A last load of laundry, while I had access to free laundry facilities. Well, free in terms of quarters, anyway. Using it adds a few cents to my parents' water and energy bills, of course. And then there's the user cost of babysitting the washing process so that the laundry room doesn't flood. I let the laundry room flood, once, and I may never live it down. But I did learn how to operate a Shop Vac on that occasion, so something useful came out of it.
• A trip to the grocery to fill my snack bag against a two-day coach-class journey. You go sleeper, you get free meals, so you only have to worry about developing an appetite on schedule. You go coach, you bring your own unless you want to be entirely dependent on the inevitably overpriced snack car.
• A visit to Phil's Grill of Metairie, next door to the grocery, to bring us back lunch. A friend tipped me off that they did veggie burgers. John proclaimed it delicious, even more so than the veggie patty at Cowbell. (He preferred Cowbell's fries, however). Meanwhile, I had a medium-well Lagniappe patty (a mixture of angus steak and andouille sausage) with havarti cheese, red onions, sauteed mushrooms, and dijon mustard. Which I proclaimed delicious. (The sweet potato fries were only so-so, alas. But who cares about fries when the burger's this good?)
• Transforming a jar of hot pickled quail's eggs into egg salad sandwiches for the train. The pickled eggs were one of a number of wares produced by a local canning outfit (whose name I have shamefully already forgot, though a quick Google suggests it may have been Joseph's Fine Foods) and sold at Rouses. I bought them on a whim. They are indeed hot, and vinegary like woah. I chopped them coarsely and mixed them together with mayonnaise, salt, pepper, Cajun Land seasoning, dried dill weed, and--here's where I'm a genius--muffuletta olive spread. Which is tasty but I must admit doesn't mitigate the vinegar any. So maybe I'm only sort of a genius.

All of which I got done between the time I got up at 9:30 AM and the time my brother picked us up at 12:45 PM. So you can see it wasn't nearly as much to freak out over as the pre-vacation pre-travel freak-out list was. And after an afternoon of riding the rails and playing on my computer, I've recovered quite well.

Tomorrow we shall be in Chicago for a bit before catching the train to Denver. And that is all for now.

Joy! A fictionette for you. In the eleventh hour as usual, but still in an hour that counts as Friday. The excerpt appears here.

Obligatory Sales Pitch: Gain instantaneous access to the full text, and the full text of all Friday Fictionettes published thus far, by becoming a Patron at the low, low price of one whole dollar per month. Fictionettes may be downloaded as attractive, tasteful, and eminently readable PDF files. Higher amounts of patronage are welcomed and encouraged with more extravagant formats, like audio and print compilations, which I promise to create any day now.

OK! With that done, I shall make excuses for my habitual lateness.

You may remember that John and I are in the New Orleans area right now? Right. So. Today was our day to be tourists in the French Quarter. You can tell we were playing the role of tourists by our resigned willingness to pay $35 plus exit traffic stress for little more than five hours of parking. Usually I try to park like a local, finding a spot in the residential parts of the Quarter or off to the side tangential to the Marigny, but today I did not want to think that hard and neither of us felt like walking that far. So we got on North Peters and turned right at the first sign that said PARKING in huge, hard-to-miss letters.

What wonderful things did we do? We ate lunch at Angeli on Decatur, marveling at the existence of a New Orleans restaurant with a meatless pasta marinara on the actual menu. I know there must be oodles of restaurants down here that can do this dish, but we have historically suffered bad luck in finding them. We also tend to fail to stumble upon restaurants that do veggie burgers round these parts, which is why we did a bit of research before deciding on a restaurant for dinner. One of the results of our research was Cowbell on Oak Street. And while the burger itself was not destined to supplant John's current favorite (that would be the one at the Walnut Brewery in Boulder, I think; John may correct me if I'm wrong), the creme brulee he had for dessert made him drunk with delight. Also the scotch he ordered to accompany it may have made him actually drunk, with drunkeness. I only had a few sips of it; I had already enjoyed two cocktails at the smoke-free and wi-fi-enabled Bourbon O where we'd rested and played on our laptops after a couple of hours of sightseeing and shopping.

Speaking of shopping, I may have found a gift for my Secret Skater. (That's what you call a Secret Santa exchange when a roller derby league does it.) I may yet find something I like better before I leave New Orleans. We'll have to see.

Tomorrow the family convenes for Grandmama's funeral and memorial service. I'm actually looking forward to it. It means more time spent with my brother and my cousins, which is always in short supply. As children growing up in the same metro area, we were always in each others' faces and driving each other batty; as adults who've more or less scattered across the states, we're friends who don't see nearly enough of each other. If it takes a funeral to bring us together for a few hours, I'll put on a skirt and go.

Afterwards, there may or may not be an outing to the Airline Skate Center. John and I brought our skates on this trip, and if I have anything to say about it we are damned well going to use them. And the late night hours will bring another outing to Hurricane's, this time for what I'm told will be the farewell performance of a cover band that my brother's been telling me I really, really ought to hear.

So it's going to be a full weekend.

Talk to you Monday.