author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today was an improvement. Instead of sleeping late and dragging around the house because of headaches and sinus pressure, I slept late and dragged about the house for the sheer pleasure of being pain-free for the first time in two days. Seriously, we are talking no small amount of bliss here.

Also, I had a dream I wanted to dwell on, or perhaps dwell in, for a little while after initially waking up with it. It involved moving into a new house, entertaining a very small child guest therein, and discovering an oven mitt full of cat hair that was defying the laws of physics. I blame late-night reading of the blog and other writings of Robert Jackson Bennett. On the one hand, the bit about acknowledging property boundaries for the communal fiction that they are, and recognizing the implied nightmare therein; and on the other hand, the bit about the Roomba.

So I got started late, but I did get started. I got busy with my submission procedures: I logged two rejection letters and sent one of the rejected stories back out again to a new market. One of the rejection letters was, happily, a response to a query letter I sent out last month seeking the status of a story I submitted last year. While I'd always prefer the story be accepted and published, it's a relief also to have the story simply pop free and be available for me to submit elsewhere. Which I hope to do tomorrow.

I got busy with overdue blogging: I finally wrote up the results of my recent Puzzle Pirates Seal o' Piracy experiments for the betterment of all. Examiner has recently moved to a new editorial model where everything you submit must be reviewed before it'll go live. I was disappointed to not be immediately placed on their list of writers the quality of whose output is sufficiently trusted that they can automatically bypass the review stage, admittedly. But given that I uploaded the post just before leaving for scrimmage, and the post had been approved and published by the time I got home, I can't complain too much. We'll see if they're just as quick at Saturday mornings; the blockade round-up is timely stuff.

Then I got home from scrimmage and got busy in the kitchen. Have I mentioned Ad Astra: The 50th Anniversary SFWA Cookbook? It's a cookbook. It's handsomely covered and conveniently spiral bound. You can buy a copy, physical or electronic. I'm in it, hawking my crockpot red beans and rice on page 154, but more to the point, a handful of handy, tasty, quick & easy mug cake recipes are in it. These are recipes where you mix everything up in a mug and then microwave the resulting batter, and you get a one-person dessert that honestly took more time to pull out and measure all the ingredients than it did to cook.

I made the Banana Cake from page 30 in one of my large tea/soup mugs. I had bananas turning black in the fridge, after all, but it's been so hot, I've been reluctant to bake more banana bread. Microwaving a mug for four minutes produces a lot less heat and just as much deliciousness. I did it twice, because the recipe only called for half a banana, and what else am I going to do with the second half of the banana? And that was fine. It was delicious twice. I had one of them before my humongous antipasta salad (we ordered Blackjack Pizza when we got home from scrimmage, and I honestly find that salad with all its cold cuts and bacon and olives and cheese and hugeness to be more filling and more fulfilling than pizza), and another afterwards. With a beer. An Abita Turbodog, to be precise.

I should point out, though, if you should acquire a copy of Ad Astra (and you should! Money well spent and for a good cause!) that the bit about "1/4 c baking powder" has got to be a typo. When you look at the other mug cake recipes, and when you look at the 1/3 c flour and pinch of salt in this one, you realize 1/4 tsp is a lot more likely. I have mentioned this to the wonderful and hard-working editors, in case they are putting together an errata page.

I'm pretty sure my red beans and rice recipe came out as intended. I skimmed it, anyway, and it looked OK. Maybe next time I make the stuff I'll use Ad Astra instead of my usual index card cheat-sheet and double-check.