author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Ever had one of those mornings where you wake up ready to do all the things, and then life gets in the way? Right. Like that. I even got up early for an 8:00 a.m. dental cleaning, came home around 9:00, and didn't go back to bed. I was awake all of the hours, but life kept wedging its way into every one of them. Appointments! Errands! Cleaning! Importunate hummingbirds!

Thankfully, I was able to convince myself with a clean conscience that some bits of life counted as writing. "Business copy-writing, pro-bono." Sound good? Right. Well, that bit of business copy-writing pretty much filled up my afternoon shift and brought me to four-hour mark; this blog post will bring me to the coveted five-hour mark.

And if it doesn't... well, I have ever so many other writing tasks need doing. And for once I'm not suffering a total enervated poop-out after derby. (I had derby tonight. Yes, my team's still on break, but heck if I'm going to miss a RollerCon debriefing practice. That's where they teach us all the things!) So. Hi.

Here's a bit of life that is tasty: the weekly CSA pick-up. The bread's a walnut sourdough this time because the regular wasn't available sliced at the moment and I was feeling adventurous. John seems to like it too; he's been munching on it while taking notes on the bout footage our team's going to be studying tomorrow evening. Collards, kale, and chard are all making an appearance. So are tomatoes, cucumber, and squash. Peppers are back--turns out they really are just bell peppers, despite that last week's did have more of a hot edge than I expect in a bell. Must have been all that hot and dry weather (where did it go, by the way? Woke up this morning and it was overcast and drizzly. Are you telling me fall is finally here?). And, making its exciting debut (at least in this venue), corn! These ears were grown at a farm in Longmont which appears to have set up a trade with the Diaz Farm for mutual fresh yumminess.

Today was a good day for eating farm fresh goodness. Breakfast was one of those hashbrown/omelet/fritter concoctions featuring kohlrabi leaves still kicking around in the crisper drawer. Also garlic, because by now I've got oodles. Lunch was Annie's Mac & Cheese, var. "Peace Parmesan," featuring kale and yellow squash from the Diaz Farm and ground Italian-style sausage from Spring Tree Farms. That would be the show pigs farm in Longmont CO, not the wedding location in Tennessee--although Baconator has hosted a few weddings on her farm, to be sure, and they were lovely affairs. But mainly she's about the pigs--hence the skate name--and she always gives her roller derby league advance notice when she's about to process a critter into sausage. We buy it up like woah, because it is delicious.

Cooking experiments inspired by Patricia McKillip's The Book of Atrix Wolfe also continue, sometimes almost by accident. Last week Wednesday I left my chiropractic appointment and wandered up the road to Skeye Brewing. Skeye has beer, and not much else. But Skeye wants you to drink more of the yummy beer, and if that involves helping you pick a tasty nearby food joint to order delivery from, then by all means. I ordered the crispy duck from one of the Chinese options (I honestly don't remember which; it's the one with a minimum delivery order of $12 instead of $15. I'll pay better attention next time). I brought home the bones and what shreds of meat I wasn't able to devour all in one sitting, and I wound up over the weekend simmering it with bay and cloves for soup, remembering the bit where the fictional head cook decrees a similar fate for the bones of a ham that went uneaten because of Plot Crisis. When it had simmered for a few hours, I drained the broth, put it back into a pot, added what meat was left along with the leftover fried rice, and had a fine light-yet-hearty soup for dinner. It was a lot like dirty rice, only soupier.

So with a certain amount of life out of the way, I go now to enjoy the bits of life that involve doing absolutely nothing productive until bedtime. Huzzah!

First off: The new new computer has arrived. Which is to say, the computer Asus sent me to replace the new computer that I sent them for repair. After they'd had that computer for two weeks, they emailed me to say that the motherboard needed replacing, but the part was all out of stock, so they proposed to replace the whole computer instead. I had a fleeting wistful thought for the stickers already affixed to the X540L. Some of them can't be replaced. But then I compared stats. The replacement unit would be an X544L with an Intel Core i7 on board. The X540L, which I'd purchased through Best Buy for about $360, had a Core i3. That's a bit of an upgrade. I said yes.

Then I waited and waited and waited and finally emailed Asus Support with, "Is it on its way, and if so, what's the tracking number?" Then I waited and waited some more, and finally they emailed me back yesterday with "Here's the tracking number and it's expected to arrive TODAY." So I scrambled over to the FedEx website, pulled up the tracking info ("On vehicle for delivery" since the wee hours) and requested they hold it at the Boulder location because I had plans to be out all afternoon. They immediately added "Delivery option requested" to the tracking information, but--and this is critical--with no guarantee that the request would be honored.

And of course it wasn't. And of course this info got added to the tracking data where I could read it about two hours later than when it actually was delivered ("Left on doorstep / Signature not required"). And of course the next bus home from Longmont wasn't for another 45 minutes. Of course.

But when I got home, there it was, sitting in its box right under the porch light, safe and sound. And today I started moving everything onto it. Even as I type these words, my entire My Documents folder is whisking its way across the local area network, one file at a time. Next up will be my Thunderbird profile.

Secondly! Operation Pseudo-Medieval Chicken is a success. It's not very medieval, pseudo or otherwise, but it's delicious. Here's what I did, in case you want to play along at home:

1. Caramelize onions in basalmic vinegar. Basically followed the step #1 of this recipe, only not exactly. For one thing, I stopped slicing onions after two because holy scallion, that's a lotta onion. I think their idea of "medium" and mine may possibly differ. For another, I substituted basalmic vinegar for honey because that's what my mouth wanted. (Also because this looked amazing.) But otherwise, it's totally just step #1 of that recipe.
2. Begin pear, pepper, chicken proceedings in crock pot. While onions were caramelizing, I sliced up the pepper and peeled, cored, and cubed the pear. (I don't remember what kind of pepper; it was shaped like a bell pepper, but its green was much paler, and it had a little bit more heat, just enough to go with the sweet.) Pepper slices went in the crock pot first, a nice even layer, and then a nice even layer of pear cubes. Finally, the two boneless, skinless chicken breasts on top. Close lid, plug it in, turn the dial to HIGH.
3. Combine. When the onions had cooked for about 30 minutes, into the crock pot they went, just right on top of everything else. Don't even bother stirring. Then I waited and waited and waited until a thermometer told me that the chicken had reached a safe 165 degrees F.
4. Quality assurance. After devouring half the contents of the crock pot, I decided the chicken could stand to pick up more flavor, and that the pear should be better integrated with the sauce. So I hacked up the chicken until it was chunks and shreds, and I mashed up the pear beyond recognition. All components were combined thoroughly and returned to the crock pot on LOW for another hour or so, then allowed to cool, then packed away into the fridge for the best possible leftovers ever.

Dang, the Thunderbird profile is already done transferring. Guess I'll send my Firefox profile over next, right after I upload this post. AND THEN ALL THINGS WRITING.

It's always exciting when the weekly CSA share has a new vegetable in it. This week featured the first green peppers of the season. I think I will put mine in my Pseudo-Medieval Chicken Experiment tomorrow, about which more in a moment. The rest of the share was: Salad greens, zucchini and/or yellow squash, cucumber, kale, collards, tomatoes, and the weekly loaf of bread. And little bitty peaches as a sort of lagniappe; a friend of the farm had given them a ton of 'em, so they were passing the yummy along to their members. I'd consider putting the peaches into the Pseudo-Medieval Chicken Experiment too, only I've already eaten them all.

OK. So. Chicken experiment. Here's the thing: I just reread Patricia McKillip's The Book of Atrix Wolfe. One of the main characters scrubs pots all day in the castle kitchens, so the reader gets to hear a lot of kitchen talk. And a lot of the kitchen talk is the head cook telling everyone what to cook. And they're cooking for the king, so you better believe they're cooking some amazing things. In quantity.

Supper was a prolonged drama of great pies of hare and venison with hunting scenes baked in dough on their crusts, vegetables sculpted into gardens, huge platters layered with roast geese, woodcocks and pigeons, and crowned with tiny hummingbirds made of egg white and sugar.

...as they drizzled a latticework of chocolate sauce on a stewed pear, and placed walnut halves on small tarts of egg and cheese and finely chopped mushrooms.

"I grated the barest fleck of nutmeg into the raspberry sauce," the sauce cook said....

I want to try it all. But there are no recipes, only these descriptions. I am astounded to be unable to find such a thing as a Cookbook of Atrix Wolfe out there in the wide Googlable world (though in my searches I did come across this article by McKillip herself retelling her most memorable kitchen disasters). I'm just going to have to improvise and research and experiment.

Some things described herein are a little beyond me...

"So I boiled the boar's head in a stock of onions and pepper and rosemary; salt I added later, and garlic," a stew-cook said to another.... "I debated raisins and cranberries, but decided on garlic instead, and tiny onions and tiny red potatoes. The brains and tongue are simmering with leeks and cloves."

...mostly because I'm not sure where I'd find a boar's head, nor a pot big enough to boil it in, nor enough people willing to try the results of the experiment with me. Most people I know draw the line at brains. If I'm cooking something uncertain, I cook in small quantities and for myself alone; the experiment may not succeed, but its audience is guaranteed to eat it regardless.

Other descriptions sound a lot more like something I could do without a lot of prep or complication:

"Sauce. Orange and honey for the duck, pear and onion for the pheasant."

So I did a little searching and found a recipe involving a sauce of pear and caramelized onion, and when I went to the grocery today I made sure to pick up a pear and a couple chicken breasts (they did not have duck or pheasant that I could see). Tomorrow or maybe Thursday I'm going to see what I can do with it.

All right! Here is last Friday's fictionette, the one for August 26: "How the Drought Was Ended" (...and at what price). There's a touch of political satire in there, if you're looking for it. It's not a big thing. It was just, given the premise, how could I resist a little poke? Anyway, you can read the teaser excerpt via the link above (here it is again!). For subscribers, there is the ebook (pdf and epub) and the audio (mp3). The latter is useful if you want to know how I pronounce the name of the Royal Hero. (You, of course, may pronounce it any way you like.)

I suspect I'll wait until Friday to release the Fictionette Freebie for August 2016. Yes, that means waiting until September 2, but it also means I can roll that announcement out with that of the first Friday Fictionette of September. Presuming I upload the thing on time. I darn well intend to. I am tired of this always-being-late nonsense!

In the meantime, I get to breathe a little. I am officially off from All Stars practice until September 20th. It's nice to have a few weeks during which I'm not working my butt off three nights a week. And, weird though it is to see my arms utterly bare of bruises, it's very nice to have a few weeks during which I'm not getting voluntarily beat up for the love of roller derby--this, in fact, is the stated purpose of having a month off; we're supposed to take this time to heal. But I miss being on skates!

Today I did a little something about that, going for a bit of an evening trail skate with my good friend and ex-next-door-neighbor Seven of Grind. (Not ex-neighbor. A five-minute walk means we remain neighbors. But before we moved, it was a 5-second walk barefoot and, if necessary, in a bathrobe.) I think we were on skates for the better part of an hour, and there were uphills and downhills and bumpy bits to toe-stop-walk over. A bit more agility and cardio than going to the Wagon Wheel would have required (we were planning on going, but not enough people RSVP'd to justify holding the adult skate session this time around), but also a bit less endurance over time, so it evens out.

Then there was yummy food and tasty beverages at the Rayback Collective, Boulder's newest... well, I don't know what to call it. Food truck park and microbrew oasis? Community space? Permanent street party? It's very Boulder, is what it is. I've had a good time hanging out there in the past for some quality playtime on my laptop. Its location right on Elmer's Two Mile Creek Greenway makes it a great place to meet friends, gear up, and start skating, which is essentially what we did.

I could see myself doing this, or something like this, once a week during my "roller derby vacation." Possibly more. Taking the time to heal is good, but there's no call to let the skating muscles get entirely out of condition.

Oh! Almost forgot: Attached please find the weekly Still Life With CSA Vegetables photo. It features:

• The weekly loaf of sourdough bread,
• garlic,
• tomatoes (including a Green Zebra - yes, it's ripe),
• collard greens,
• kale,
• radishes,
• and a bag of young salad greens.

Here is what I've been doing with the collard greens: I have been shredding some four or so leaves into a mixture of grated potato, grated turnip, and minced garlic, all bound up with a couple beaten eggs and seasoned with garlic salt and both black and red pepper, the resulting hash/fritter/omelet/pancake fried in canola oil until thoroughly cooked and crispy on both sides. Spread apple sauce on top, and breakfast is a time of great joy.

Ta-da!

OK. So. D2 Wichita. That... was a thing that happened.

It is much easier to talk about vegetables.

Yesterday I managed to drag myself up to Longmont for chiro and then back down to Boulder to drop off the rental car. Then I managed to walk home from the Hertz establishment (via the Parkway Cafe for brunch and the bank for check deposits). Today I managed to get out of the house like a regular human being and bike up to the farm for CSA pick-up. I keep saying "managed" because it feels like an accomplishment.

Quite a few of my teammates--and my coach, too--had to go back to work on Monday. I am not sure how they managed it.

While I was at the Parkway Cafe, one of the waitstaff looked at me and said, "So who's been beating on you? Roller derby, right?" I said, "Yeah, about four teams worth. It was playoffs." When she brought me my check she told me to "go home and heal up." I have come home from derby looking bruised before, but this time around, I looked like a plague victim. It was ridiculous. And I had a swollen, tender lymph node on the right because apparently sufficient blunt force trauma can trigger an immune system reaction. Turns out that four games against D2-level teams can do that to a body.

Nevertheless, like I said, I did manage to bring home the veggies today. What we have here is the weekly loaf of bread plus kale, collards, kohlrabi, tomatoes, cucumber, garlic, and radishes. I immediately broke into that bounty to use up most of the rest of my stuffed chard leaf stuffing from Thursday: breakfast sausage, wild rice, garlic, chives, parsley, salt, pepper, red pepper, and an egg. This time I blanched all the kohlrabi leaves from this and previous weeks, and some of last week's kale, to wrap it up in, overlapping leaves where a single leaf was too small. That, plus some cucumber-and-tomato salad, was dinner.

The stuffed chard leaves worked out quite well, by the way. I munched half of them on the ride over to Wichita and the other half on Friday between games.

Do I sound a little scattered? I'm still a little scattered. Getting better. Managed to get some writing done and also some league admin stuff--mostly the bout production and forum admin stuff that was waiting for me. Spent most of the evening pruning spam registrations out of the database, as that takes mercifully little brain.

The weekend used up all of my brain. Well, most of it. What little mind it didn't use up it simply blew. Lots of minds were blown. Because out of our four games, we won three. We came in as the #8 seed but walked away with 5th Place. We came within 15 points of beating the #1 seed, and we did beat the #2 seed, making WFTDA history thereby. Then we drove home, essentially going "That game. OMG that game" to each other pretty much all 550 miles of the way.

OMG that game. Those games. OMG this weekend.

That's the short story.

I may manage the longer version tomorrow.

So, pro-tip about those 12-hour Sudafed tablets. Turns out, it's not such a good idea to take one at 5:00 PM, not if they're the Non-Drowsy Maximum Strength variety. I did not actually get to sleep until... well, almost 5:00 AM, about 12 hours after I took the dratted thing. I really should have also bought a box of the 4-hour tablets, just for scheduling flexibility. Well. I'll know for next time.

Anyway, there's no way I can make it through a work day on only three hours sleep, especially if there's roller derby practice at the end of it. The last roller derby practice before playoffs, in fact. Kind of important. So once I was able to sleep I tried to stay that way for as long as I could. Which meant I wasn't out of bed until after one in the afternoon. Which meant not a lot of things got done other than the absolutely necessary.

One of those absolutely necessary things, of course, was biking up to The Diaz Farm for my CSA share. Yay, pretty pictures of delicious veg! Those two Early Girl tomatoes were the high point of this week's pick-up--the first fresh, ripe tomatoes of the season. I immediately ate one with about half a cucumber, sliced up and dressed with a creamy balsamic vinaigrette. I've been fortunate to have been getting a few small tomatoes here and there from my back porch plants--Sungold cherries, elongated San Marzanos, and little round Brillantes, all of them more orange than red (expected behavior for the Sungolds, not quite so much for the others) and probably a little stunted from their growing conditions. But these plump two tomatoes coming home from the farm today were quite a treat.

I've been thinking about ways to convert some of this bounty into road trip snacks. The carrots are obvious--just bring them like they are. Maybe chop the largest ones into sticks. Zucchini is also tasty raw. I still haven't made those carrot-and-kohlrabi fritters; those would probably transport well. My latest genius idea is sausage-stuffed chard leaves--blanche the chard until tender, put a dollop of ground sausage cooked with onions and garlic into each, then just roll the leaves up into little bundles. Kind of like dolmades, but with chard instead of grape leaves. (Baking may be involved. I forget. I need to check my recipes.) Then stick them in a plastic bag, shove 'em in the ice chest, and eat 'em cold in the car whenever hungry.

Speaking of D2 Playoffs, I've had a request to post ALL THE LINKS here. The link above features our tournament bracket (there's that link again!), showing who plays whom at what time. You can see that we start out in Game 2 against the Chicago Outfit at 10 AM Central (9 AM Mountain) Noon Central (11 AM Mountain) on Friday, August 19. After that, our schedule depends on wins and losses.

Edit: I keep saying our first game is scheduled for 10 AM because for a hot minute it was. But then they changed the schedule, giving us the noon game, and we all breathed a sigh of relief because a lot of us aren't getting into town until midnight that morning. Still, I seem unable to wrap my brain around it for the purposes of telling people when to watch us.

If you want to watch it live--and why wouldn't you? Three days of non-stop derby derby derby featuring some of the best teams internationally!--you can get set up to do just that over at WFTDA.tv. You can buy a watch pass just for this weekend, or you can buy the big ol' humongous package that covers your live derby viewing pleasure for both D2 weekends, all four D1 weekends, and Championships too:

• D2 Playoffs: Wichita, Aug 19 – 21 – BUY WATCH PASS ($12.99)
• BUY PLAYOFFS + CHAMPIONSHIPS BUNDLE (U.S. ONLY) ($75)
• BUY PLAYOFFS + CHAMPIONSHIPS BUNDLE (NON-U.S. ONLY) ($75)
• View all available watch passes for the 2016 International Playoffs & Championships

Links will take you to the page on which you'd watch the stream, where you'll be prompted to log in. If you haven't yet bought your "virtual ticket," you'll click the green button with the price tag on it. That will pop up a window in which you'll log onto Cleeng.com, which is the outfit that WFTDA uses to manage the sale of watch passes.

I'm guessing that the bundle is divided into a U.S. and a Non-U.S. version because it includes Championships, which is being carried by sports channel ESPN3 for the second year running. When major cable TV gets involved, national borders become a Thing. The pass just for this weekend does not specific U.S. or Non, and the broadcast is just your regular WFTDA.tv livestream, which is essentially an HD Youtube video--it ought to be viewable from anywhere in the world. But I have had one friend in Canada (a flagmate on Puzzle Pirates, of course!) tell me that it wouldn't even let him log on because "it hates Canadians!" I have not yet confirmed that the link above is the link he tried, though, so I'm really not 100% certain about this. I double-checked Cleeng's FAQ, and it had a lot to say about watching from within the EU and so forth; besides, Cleeng is what they're using to sell the Non-U.S. watch pass bundle. (Maybe you should log onto Cleeng via the Non-U.S. bundle, but then back out before actually buying it, and then see if you can buy the watch pass via the D2 Wichita link now that you're successfully logged in?)

Anyway, if you're outside the U.S. and want to watch us skate this weekend, let me know whether the single weekend D2 pass works for you. Inquiring minds etc.

If you don't want to, or aren't able to, watch us live, then keep your eyes on the archives, as all D2 Wichita games will probably show up there early next week. Archived footage at WFTDA.tv is always free to watch.

That's it for me tonight--I'm going to be very good and do my at-home traction, but after that I'm down for the count. I took a 12-hour Sudafed just about 12 hours ago, so with any luck I'll actually get to sleep tonight. Good luck me.

It's Tuesday. Tuesday is CSA day. CSA day used to be Monday, but then Monday became a chiro day and that was just too many errands in one day without guaranteed use of the car. So now it is Tuesday.

Accompanying this post is a picture of the fresh, delicious things that came home with me from The Diaz Farm. The vegetables (rainbow chard, Italian kale, carrots, kohlrabi, a cucumber and a couple of green tomatoes for frying; there was also garlic but I have enough right now) correspond to a small-size share. The bread is an add-on I signed up for, and is delicious. The free-range mixed-flock eggs I buy on an as-needed basis for $5.50. You can also buy duck eggs for a little bit more (the rear six eggs in the picture are duck eggs). They are huge and delicious but a little harder to crack into and I am not always in the mood.

Here is how Tuesday is supposed to go:

• 9:00-9:30 AM: Writing (morning pages)
• 9:30-10:00 AM: Breakfast, brush teeth, water plants
• 10:00 AM-12:00 PM: Writing (freewriting, fictionette, submission proceedures)
• 12:00-2:00 PM: Bike up to farm for CSA pick-up, make myself some lunch, eat, goof off
• 2:00-4:00 PM: Writing (current story or novel project)
• 4:00-5:30 PM: Email and other communications. Dinner. Also pack gear and get dressed for derby
• 5:30-10:00 PM: All Stars practice (6:30-9:30) and associated travel time
• 10:00-11:30 PM: Foam roller and at-home traction session
• 11:30 PM-12:00 AM: Writing (blog post)
• 12:00-1:00 AM: Goof off a bit, read, whatever. Also get ready for bed.
• 1:00 AM: Go to sleep.

Hm. Written out like that, it sounds like a mercilessly busy schedule... except for the, y'know, 5-hour work day with the 2-hour lunch break. OK, it actually sounds like a really cushy job. AND I STILL CAN'T SEEM TO STICK TO THE SCHEDULE.

Problem the first: It really requires that I get up on time. That did not happen this morning. Possibly because I was unable to get to sleep until about 3:00 AM; my upper back was giving me grief again.

Problem the second: Once things start getting late, it's almost impossible to steal time from the rest of the schedule. If the morning writing shift gets cut short by an hour, then I just end my lunch break at 1:00 instead of 2:00, right? Except I cannot whittle "bike up to farm for CSA pick-up, make myself lunch, eat" down to one hour, even if I excise the "goofing off" part. Which for some reason I find myself practically unable to do. At least I wound up making my lunch so filling (big salad featuring today's veg and last week's mixed greens; far too much French toast made with heel of last week's bread) that I would up not needing dinner, so I could write right up to 5:00 PM. Cooking and eating takes up time, y'all.

Problem the third: There is a reason I only expect half an hour of writing after derby. If I lose some of my writing time to, er, "activity creep," well, it's going to be damn hard to extract that work out of myself after three hours of skating hard and turning left. Not to mention plyometric conditioning. The body has sucked all the carbs out of the system and the brain has no fuel to go on. Also I'm now a little sore from the foam roller and traction stuff.

(At-home traction involves lying on the ground with my neck supported by a triangular plastic device that looks a lot like a hands-free book holder. The head is allowed to loll back, creating the curve which we are trying to train the spine to achieve. The first sessions are short, but one increases the time as one grows accustomed to the experience. Ice on the neck and upper back after the session is recommended.)

But I am determined to see how far into August I can get with a perfect record of "perfect days," which is to say, days on which I've successfully checked off every item on my Dailies list in Habitica. And so, having only done three hours of writing rather than four and a half before derby, I return to my desk, determined to reach my goal no matter how tired I am. DETERMINED.

So. When this blog post is done, I'm going back to the embarrassingly belated July 22 Friday Fictionette. It's almost ready. The text is all done and the Audiofictionette is recorded. I just need to create the cover art, compile the .pdf and .epub, put the teaser excerpt together for release on Patreon and on this-here blog, and put everything up where you can see it. I expect I'll get some way into some of that tonight and, if I am very fortunate, publish the whole shebang tomorrow.

However, tomorrow is full of things--obligations as well as options--and I'm a little worried about getting everything done.

I can at least solve one problem by GETTING UP ON TIME, DRAT YOU. Do it!

Today was the summer solstice and also our wedding anniversary, John's and mine. The two do not always coincide, what with the solstice's wandering each year between the 20th and the 22nd, but it fell on the 20th back in 1998 when we chose to hold our handfasting on that spoke in the wheel of the year, and it fell on the 20th this year too.

It also happens to be my parents' anniversary. My mom, bless her, no longer remembers the words for a lot of things, and she's lost an appalling amount of names and faces and memories, but she remembers the significance of June 20th. "We've been married 47 years," she said to me on the phone yesterday. "That's fantastic," I said. "We've been married 18. It's not as impressive as 47, but we think it's a good start."

Some years we reserve a table somewhere fancy or fun, like the Melting Pot in Louisville or, when it was still around, John's Restaurant (no relation) on Pearl Street. This year we opted to stay in. He hit the grocery on the way home, I biked to the farm for our CSA pick-up, and together we made home style mac 'n cheese, a big salad, and some garlic bread.

I will share with you the garlic bread recipe, because it's the first time I got it right. Previous times, I melted butter, stirred in minced garlic, then spread it on bread which I cooked under the broiler. It was good, but it was weirdly one-note. The butter flavor was "thin," if that makes sense. Even sprinkling grated Parmesan cheese on top only did so much. But today I went looking around online, found this recipe, and realized that the key was using garlic powder rather than minced garlic. Garlic powder mixes the flavor through the butter much better. It also seems to thicken the spread somewhat.

1. Hack the end of last week's Artisan Sourdough Bread into thick slices.
2. Melt 1/4 C butter in the microwave.
3. Add to the butter 1/2 tsp garlic powder, 1 tbl minced fresh parsley, about 1/4 C shredded or grated parmesan. (Recipe calls for salt and pepper. I forgot to add it.) Stir, stir, stir.
4. Spread butter mixture on each slice of bread.
5. Stack bread and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Store in the refrigerator until dinner time.
6. While the macaroni water is trying to boil, preheat oven to 350 F. When oven goes ding, put bread in for about 8 or 10 minutes. Then turn oven up to broil and let it go another couple minutes until edges are as crispy as you like. (Do not overdo this unless you like your crust to be as hard as a rock.)

John proclaimed the crunchy crispy garlic bread to be the perfect textural contrast to the soft mac 'n cheese, and his sweet tea to be the perfect taste contrast to the tart pomegranate-chocolate vinaigrette on the salad. (It's our last bottle of Ravenous Chocolate. I have no idea if the company is still around. They used to come sell their salad dressings at the Boulder Farmer's Market.)

After dinner, we settled into the couch for the reading of Chapter 19 of Ancillary Sword. Just that one chapter, mind you, however much we want to devour the rest of the book in a sitting. We hope to finish up before we leave town Friday morning; then we will only need to bring one book with us (Ancillary Mercy, of course) rather than two. ("Are there really only three books?" John asked mournfully the day we read Chapter 17. "Well, so far, yes. And a handful of short stories." He thought that was Sad.)

Eighteen years. Nowhere near done yet. But definitely a good start. Let's keep it up.

Happy day! Today is the first day of the 2016 CSA Season at the Diaz Farm. I biked up there and picked up spinach, chard, kale, and my weekly loaf of bread. Bought a dozen eggs, too. Then I biked home and consumed one of the bundles of kale in a huge bowl of udon soup. It went something like this:

1. In about 4 cups water, bring dry udon noodles to a boil. Cook until tender. Then pour out all but about a cup and a half of the water and dissolve bouillon of your choice in what remains. Add a little kimchi juice.
2. While noodles are boiling, cook about a half of an onion and a couple cloves garlic in some oil.
3. When onion and garlic are soft, chop up and add kale as well as the stems of a bok choi.
4. When these are soft, add the rest of the bok choi, a couple green onions, a handful of snap peas, and two links Chinese sausage, all chopped up bite-size.
5. Combine stir-fried vegetables with noodles in broth. Eat with chopsticks and a spoon.

I think I'll have some of the spinach with my breakfast eggs and toast tomorrow.

The tournament over the weekend went well. That is, we didn't win any of our games, but we fought hard, learned a lot, and our team did not suffer any injuries. (The tournament was not, sadly, injury-free; one jammer sustained a dislocated finger, another a concussion, and, unusually, a referee went home with a hairline fracture in her arm.) I played in only one game, the Friday morning bout against Denver. My big embarrassing moment--there's always one--was taking an unnecessary extra lap on my first penalty because I forgot where the penalty box was. But I had more good moments than embarrassing ones.

Despite only skating one bout, I was exhausted by the end of the weekends. Something about spending all the livelong hours of three days straight in a large venue full of people, it wears on a body. I can't even imagine how worn out the skaters on our main roster were, not to mention all the coaches and referees.

It possibly also didn't help things that John and I were super self-indulgent when it came time to read another chapter of Ancillary Justice aloud Saturday night. "More, please," John said after the one chapter was over, and again after the next chapter, and the next... Hell, we finished the book. Then, at home, late Sunday night, we got through fully half of the sequel Ancillary Sword. This was not the smartest thing we've ever done, I have to admit, but it was exceedingly pleasant.

Anyway, it's back to life-as-normal for now, with another regular work-week already in progress. Tomorrow: Lots of writing! All the writing! And also probably a bit of Puzzle Pirates, because there will be time.

OK! All right. I appear to be at a restaurant in the Belmar shopping center. Village. The Belmar metropolis. If anyone says to you, "Oh, it's in Belmar, you can't miss it" (as someone once said to me in reference to the location of a roller derby afterparty) do not be satisfied with this. Ask for more precise directions. Ask for a progressive taxi.

We had Google Maps. It was fine. We are now enjoying garlic mozzarella sticks and the anticipation of cheese pizza and shrimp pasta. We are also enjoying great music and really fast wi-fi, both of which we will not get at our hotel unless we get it ourselves. So current plans are to hang out at the restaurant until it closes, or until our batteries run out, or until our consciences wake up and tell us we really should get to bed, whichever comes first.

Since we want to be at the tournament venue at 7:30 AM tomorrow morning, it'll probably be our consciences that get first say.

In any case, today has been a success. Papa Whiskey got to the captains' meeting on time--early, in fact--and is going to tell the team all about it through the proper channels. I cleaned both my sets of bearings and wheels, and I extracted the yuck from my skate axles. (There was a lot of yuck to extract.) I did all the laundry, including all my derby wear, all of which I packed because, hey, potentially three days of derby. I recorded both of my volunteer reading shows that are due Saturday morning, so there will be no awkwardness about getting those done in a hotel room where people are trying to sleep.

And I posted tomorrow's Friday Fictionette today! If that isn't success, I don't know what is. Success comes with another very long title: "Objectivity and the Art of the Documentary." It is yet another Nine of Pentacles tale: A woman, a house, a bird. Haven't we been here before? The bird is, once again, a magpie. But this magpie isn't stealing anything. Just borrowing.

That announced, I have fulfilled the last of my responsibilities for the night--I mean, aside from things like brushing my teeth and whatnot. Whatnot is not what you're here for. Aside from the whatnot, I'm done, I'm outta here, I commend my soul to the Goddesses of Roller Derby, I'll see you on Monday.

(Oh, hey, my pasta's here!)