Oops.

 I fell behind.  Really, really behind.  

(We're still tinkering with my natural thyroid dose--and it was too low, this time, so I fell behind on a LOT.)

I have a new book out.  This one is a coming-of-age story, suitable for as young as 11 or so.  It's also an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, and a set-up for a development of a new civilization.  It's doing a lot for a middle-grades-and-up story. 

The Passing of the Age (if cover doesn't link)

Once, gods and Titans went to war because humanity existed and the Titans...didn’t like that. Will, the blacksmith’s apprentice, was born long after the war’s bitter, destructive, last gasp. It left the land scarred, leaving behind the Wastes, a massive pit in the landscape, dug by poisoned magic. The old world was lost in the ashes, and survivors were left with so little that any who didn’t pull their weight (or had something someone powerful wanted) were exiled to starve in the Wastes.

Just. Like. Will.

Cast out to the Wastes because his father remarried and his stepmother had wanted her children to inherit, he turned to his master, the smith. The smith, who had held Will back to keep using his labor for free, refused to go against the rest of the village, angry though he was to lose Will’s labor. In lieu of the honestly-earned status of journeyman that would have protected Will from exile, his master gave him a bag of grave goods: a hammer (but not a good one), tongs (that were rusting to pieces), and a file (more than half worn out). And two small coins to pay the ferryman when he reached the river dividing life from death.

Will entered the wastes with the clothes on his back, inadequate grave goods, and determination to live through it, in spite of his village. And a mission given him by the Land, and by the god of the wild places, to take the knife he made with his grave goods to the very center of the Wastes. There, he will find his destiny.

Mind you, this isn't part of the Modern Gods series.  This just...jumped me, while I was trying to write something else. 

The Passing of the Age is already live.  It dropped last week.  It's available, right now, for either sale, or borrowing through Kindle Unlimited. 

New book!

 

Dear Senator Hawley,

You're a pencil-necked, sanctimonious, viciously ambitious jackass.  I've disliked you since you were instrumental in getting rid of what would have been the best governor Missouri had had in decades, then used that to springboard yourself from Missouri AG to U.S. Senator.  Seriously disliked you, to the point of voting against you when you ran.*

That said, you spent your first few years in office doing things that I liked.  I started to like you in spite of myself.  However, I have never trusted you.  I have never forgotten your ambition, and I assumed it would have you turning on us, your constituents, the second you felt you had a better offer.  Or someone had something on you.  Or...you felt like it.   

Because you?  You're not an honest politician.**  You're a reform politician.  And recently, someone got to you.  

You came out and said that Medicaid must be expanded, not cut.  This is not just wrong, it's so wrong that I'm absolutely certain that you could probably give yourself a visual cardiac examination without having to use any equipment to do so, other than maybe a flashlight.

Senator, Medicaid is never in the people's best interests.  It is a shitty program that gives shitty service to people who don't have a choice between accepting being treated like shit and potentially dying.  Expanding Medicaid takes a limited amount of dollars and spreads it over more people, which means that they'll get shittier service, because there's less resources per person. 

Not only that, but it costs everyone more.  Including the poor people you're trying to help.

And I swear unto God that if you succeed in expanding Missouri Medicaid, I will never vote for you again.  If you vote for it, I won't vote for you.  Hell, if you continue to advocate for that, rather than beating back the ACA requirements that forced people into it that shouldn't be on it, I won't ever vote for you again.  Because you'll have proved yourself an utter moron that shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power.

Most sincerely,

A disgusted voter

Update: Yeah, no.  With this he's lost my vote.  Period fucking dot.  I do not want him going in with a NY D on a "mental wellness" bill for first responders.  First, because I don't trust a D to have anyone's best interests in mind, and second, because fuck them, they lost, they can suck it, no mercy, no cooperation.  It is, after all, how they roll. 

*Senators should not be up for a popular vote.  The amendment that gave the people the vote for senators should be repealed.  There was a solid reason why the senate was made up of individuals appointed by the governors of the states for the six year terms: senators were to keep the state's interests in mind in their votes, not the popular interests.  

**Heinlein said it best: an honest politician, once he's bought stays bought.  A reform politician, though...all you have to do is convince him that what you want him to do is in the best interests of the people, even when it's patently not, and he'll turn on his constituents.  

Of all the elitistst, condescending bullshit...

I will admit, I have been ignoring national politics.  I can't afford the energy it takes to keep up with everything happening.*  I have too much other work to do as a housewife, stay-at-home-mom, and writer.**  So, I may very well be terribly late to the party, but I caught wind of a rumor.  

Apparently, there's a possibility of Robin Hood giving back some of our tax money that our illegitimate government entities have been stealing from us, via USAID and other vehicles: the DOGE dividend checks.  President Trump says that it could be coming; that it would be a $5K direct deposit, in a similar manner to the COVID stimulus checks.  

On the one hand, it's an utterly brilliant publicity stunt.  

On the other?  Well.  We're still riding out the inflation caused by the previous stupid move; the DOGE dividend would be more of the same, but worse because bigger checks.***

And then...then I saw the whining.  Of course the hard left is whining.  USAID was paying the media to denigrate us.  All of us.  Our tax dollars went to pay for anti-American propaganda to be sprayed thicker over Americans via the legacy media than shit on a field at fertilizing time.****   

The whining is always glorious, but so mouth-breathing, drooling stupid that I tune it out.  

And then something got past my filters: "DOGE dividends won't change anything! They're too small! What's $5K going to do for low income families, anyway?" 

Fucking what.  

Even if this just goes out to families that, y'know, fucking pay taxes, this is absolutely going to make a difference.  Most families are straining.  Between being underpaid because of the mass importation of next-to-slave-labor to keep paychecks and salaries artificially low, and inflation, and stupid fucking regulations laid on production by un-elected bureaucrats,***** most families are having to use credit cards to stay afloat.  We're not living paycheck to paycheck.  We're living hand-to-mouth. 

Would you like to know what our "betters" think we'll spend it on?  They think we'll spend it on groceries (whose fault would that be, fuckers?), or on alcohol, or on vacations, or on other things...and that it won't buy much.  Some admit that we might use it to pay down credit card or student debt--but again, it won't make much of a dent.  

They're right, on the student debt, by the way--but again, that's their fault.  

Besides.  Who are they to decide for us what's best for us?  

That dividend check, should it come, would be used for postponed household repairs, in this house.  Or on tuition, given the utter shit that is the public education system.  Or maybe used in part to set up so that they can't impact our grocery bill by PETArded regulations on animals they have no idea how to fucking care for.

The other bitch-and-moan I've heard from the left is that the checks won't help the American people more than once.  That it would not change things for us long term.

On that front...they're not wrong.  Even if reducing the amount of debt we're all carrying by that much would be helpful in both the short and long term, that's just a one-time help, not something that will change things for most households permanently.

Want to know what will?  

Having the slave labor deported.  All of it.  From the illegal aliens invading from the southern (and northern) borders to the H1B workers in tech and medicine, get rid of the slave labor.  Let wages come up to where they should be.  

Repeal the income tax amendment.  Cut all capital gains taxes to nothing more than the officially stated inflation rate.  Free our business sector to grow.  

Institute tariffs on goods coming in to match tariffs placed on our goods by nations importing from us.  Double the tariffs on goods produced by slave labor. (Yes, China, I'm aiming at you.). The money coming in from that funded the federal government's Constitutionally-required responsibilities for more than half of our existence.  It should be able to continue to do so without any issues...so long as the government remembers that it is limited by the Constitution to these responsibilities.   

That means no more money being taken from us to go out in the form of foreign aid to people who hate us (Europe, China, Korea, Middle East).  No more money laundering (as DOGE has found out, 90% of that money was being laundered, and paid to entities in the US working against our interests).  No more hostage puppies. 

No more gain-of-function research paid for by our taxes, but done in enemy nations because we have laws against it, and they don't. 

No more paying to prop up legacy media that has lost most of the American trust.  No more paying to prop up communism--it's a bad idea that should be taken off life support.  

In short?  I'm absolutely in favor of DOGE.  I'm in favor of everything the President is doing.   

Hell, I'm sitting back with a huge bowl of popcorn.  Want some? 

 

*There has been a lot happening.  I was paying attention for the first few days after President Trump took office, but there was so much I couldn't keep up, so I stopped trying.  

**Before everyone weighs in, as a HW/SAHM, I'm juggling four full-time jobs' worth of work.  And then add another part-time job writing for some income (and sanity)...it gets overwhelming.

***The COVID checks for my household were just over $3K.  The predicted DOGE check is $5K.  Not sure if that's per taxpayer or per household, but there it is.

****No farmer worth his salt would spray that much manure on any field--it would burn the plants.

*****Egg production.  Between the "cage free" requirements laid on factory farms by people who've never fucking seen a chicken in person, much less how they behave, and requirements that one bird in one barn testing positive for bird flu means that all chickens in all barns must be slaughtered, we simply do not have enough layers. 

Dear Amazon,

Yesterday, I got an email with a link to a survey over your search function.  I went to click on it...and it took me to a page that told me to get my mobile device.  That I would need to search on my phone.  And use that, and the results from it for the survey.  Like I would do if I were shopping.  

Y'all have made some assumptions, here.  You do know what they say about assumptions, right?  

I didn't take the survey, because I do not use my phone to shop.  I don't use it to browse the internet.  I don't use it to play games.  I don't use it for day-to-day anything.  My phone is a safety device, not a leash, and definitely not something I can't do without.  In fact, half the time, I forget to make sure the damn thing is charged.  

That said.  I have a lot of friends who have taken your survey.  And they, and I, have complaints about your search function.  

First, the haystack.  Sure, you've got an enormous haystack to search through.  Biggest in the world.  Most types of hay...only, you've got a problem.  We aren't looking for hay.  We're looking for a needle.  

That's right.  Your search dumps thousands upon thousands of results on us...mostly unrelated to that thing we're actually searching for.  

That tells me that a) your coders and other employees are utterly incompetent at the jobs you've hired them for, which is a waste of your time and money, or b) you're wasting my time, hoping to get more of my money.

That's...not the way it works.  You waste my time, you don't get any more of my money.  I'll take it and go somewhere that the search function isn't broken.  Or at least, not broken as badly.  

Which leads me to my next complaint: you done fucked up the Boolean searches.  I remember using them.  "And" narrowed the search down.  "Or" expanded it.  "Not" filtered out the things that were almost right, but not what I was looking for.  

I used those all the way through grad school, doing keyword searches through literally billions of words in articles, in millions of articles, in hundreds of thousands of subjects for the fifty or so journals that might have the dozen or so sources I needed for my research papers.  It worked there.  It should work in your shopping site.   

It should work especially well in doing searches for Kindle reading.  

But it doesn't.  I don't know why, but y'all done fucked that up long before you fucked up everything else.

Here's the thing: I already subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.  I buy a lot of books otherwise, too.  I have preferences, and those preferences do not include the kind of crap your searches show, and I can't narrow the searches down to find the things I do want to read.  

So, instead of reading new things, I re-read the old.  Even when I'd rather have something new, I simply can't find anything.  Because you fucked up the search functions for it.  I'd love to give you more money (I'd love to have more--I'm pretty sure my books would show up in more searches for people who'd enjoy reading what I write if your search wasn't broken), but I don't buy things just because you shove them in my face.  Hell, I won't even borrow things just because you shove them in my face.  I don't like the sort of things you shove in my face; I'm sure as fuck not wasting my limited time and money on them.  

Please.  Fix the search function.  Make it actually, y'know, functional.  

And then?  Then, we'll be spending a whole lot more of our disposable income.  We could even have more disposable income.  

 Thanks,

A dissatisfied customer 

New book!

 

 

 

I had a new book go live, yesterday.  I was planning on embedding the link so y'all could see it, but...apparently Amazon's decided that us authors don't require that as an option in the share button anymore.  Or at least, not an easy one.  Let's see if I can't find a work-around that I am capable* of doing...

 

 

Click on the cover.  If  that doesn't work, here's the link at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNX9VNJH

This is a bit different from my normal works--it has a little more in common with The Last Pendragon than it does anything else.  I'd intended for it to be a short story, but...yeah.  Character went, "Wait.  I'm the bad guy?  I don't wanna be the bad guy!  Let me fix it!"  And...eight thousand words of short story turned into more than forty thousand of short novel.  

No, I have no idea why it turned out that way.  Characters just...occasionally...hijack my stories and run off cackling with the plot.

*I am not, by any means, computer literate.  I am, at best, a competent user.  I don't do stupid things that break critical stuff like my mother and aunts did.  I can use a few programs, but that's about it. 

Indeed

This morning, my fourteen year old daughter summed things up: "2025 has started on WTF."  

And really, it kind of has.  I'm still reeling over not having had the election stolen last November.  I'm waiting with a sense of dread for January 6*, then January 20.  I don't know exactly what's going to happen.  I know what I'd like to have happen--a quiet, peaceful transition of power from the commies back to America--but I doubt the party that considers itself as carrying the banner of progress** has that kind of maturity and dignity.  

I can't predict anything that might happen.  The hard left has broken too many things.  The only thing I can predict is toddler-tantrums from the perpetual children that think they should be the ones running the show.  In fact, we're already seeing some of them ramping up.  Unfortunately for the sulking snots, Musk's cockroach-trucks*** have proved to have more in common with the Volkswagen Polo than it does the Ford Pinto.   

WTF may well set the tone for most of the year.  And if it does? 

It at least will have warned us, first.

*January 6.  Four years ago, we had the shameful conclusion of the stolen election, with the worthless piece of shit backstabbing the nation by certifying an election I SAW flipping votes FROM Trump TO Biden, and the protesters who left their weapons at their homes or hotels arrested and held as political prisoners for heeding the invitation to enter the Capitol building, unwittingly participating in the dramatic not-insurrection, and giving the drama-llamas excuse to panic and screech about a coup that wasn't happening to them. And then last year, I lost my mother.  So...kind of a shitty date.  

**The Democrats/hard left aren't carrying the banner of progress like they think.  They've actually forced a regression to the late '70's, economically. 

***There's a brown Cybertruck that drops off/picks up kids at the private school my two attend.  It struck me as familiar, and triggered revulsion.  After about three days, I realized that it looked just like a cockroach.  The brown ones that are damn near impossible to get rid of, once you've got an infestation. 

A review

 So.  A few years ago, I bought a copy of Office '03.  It had five uses.  I used my last one on my last laptop.  

Which died last April.  Well, started dying, probably in March or so.  

My laptop is my livelihood.  I do everything on it: writing, publishing, budgeting, household accounting, planning, communicating with the kids' school, checking their grades...everything.  I can't do that with a dead laptop.  I mean, sure, I can use one of the desktops, but there are times I'm not physically capable of working at a desk, but the work goes on.  

I ordered a new one from Amazon.  And a thumb drive (well, pinky-fingernail drive--a 500 GB one the size of a dongle) to put all my files on.  The drive arrived the last day of April, and I was able to copy everything onto it before the old laptop gave up its last gasp, and the new laptop came in on the first of May.  

It had a year of Office 365.  So, I pulled it up and started using it.  Finished the final draft of Certified Public Assassin on it, and pulled the trigger on publishing...

...and something about the newest Word threw tantrums about working with older Word.  To the point of breaking even LibreOffice.  Oh, the electronic copy of Certified Public Assassin worked okay, but I could not get the print version to fly.  No, Word insisted on fucking up with the margins.  It did not matter what I did, I could not get the print version to work.  And I hacked away at that, on and off, for six fucking months.  

So, my Office subscription runs out at the end of next April.  I could re-up for a hundred bucks a year...every year.  I could. 

But I don't wanna.  It's a cheat.  I don't replace a laptop every year.  I don't pay for a new computer every year.  Why should I have to rent my software every year? 

I figured I'd have to switch over to LibreOffice at the end of the year, when my subscription ran out, when I bought the laptop.  

And then...a miracle happened.  I've made money, this year.  Not a lot, but double what I did last year.  And I'm producing again.  

That changed the dynamics a bit.  And changed my mental dialogue a lot.  I mean, if I'm actually making money,* shouldn't I have tools to make money with?  

Keep in mind, I'm categorically opposed to renting software.  I talked it over with my other half, and when Black Friday deals hit, I purchased a new writing/formatting software: Atticus.  

On a whim, I uploaded Certified Public Assassin, and put it through the formatting.  And then, I uploaded the file to Amazon, and looked at the internals. 

Lo and behold: the text stayed within the margins.  Everything looked good. The cover took some extra work, but everything worked.  Everything worked.  I could publish a print version.  Atticus fixed what rented Word broke.  And Certified Public Assassin is now available in hardback!

So I can definitively state that it works as a formatting tool.  It's worth the (one time) cost for that alone.  

However, that's not all it does: it works quite well as writing software, and allows you to set writing goals, too.  And uses reminders to keep you  on task when you sit down to write.  Something Word does not help with.  It also keeps track of your word count by chapter as well as by book file.  Yeah, it takes some getting used to, but it really is intuitive, and a good bit easier to use than Word.  Your screen's less busy, less distracting, you're only looking at one chapter at a time; while yes, that means you have to dig into it to look at how your entire document is looking, you can get a page estimation by the trim size you want to use for the project you're working on.  It shows you previews of your project by how it'll look in print, or in any of several e-book readers/reader software on a tablet. 

I would say that this is probably one of my best investments into my career as a writer.  I am honestly blown away by the sheer awesome.  I mean, maybe there's better writers' software on iThing platforms, but this is, I think, perhaps hands down the best one out there for anything else. 

I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

*Double last year's income is a bit under half what I made in my first year teaching for MSSU.  A hair under a semester's pre-tax income, in  other words. 

A thought.

Something occurred to me, late last night, as I was drifting off to sleep.  I've often referred to the tantrum-throwing left as toddlers...and that connected with all the kids pretending to be anything other than what they are.  

This is a normal stage in human development.  

Both my imp (now 16) and my pixie (soon to be 14) threw tantrums.  I showed them through being firm and consistent with consequences that tantrums would not only not get them what they wanted, but would get them the opposite of what they wanted.  

Unfortunately, we've got eighty years of protests of varying levels of justice and violence demonstrating to a lot of these overgrown toddlers that yes, tantrums do work.  Unfortunately, it's going to take a lot of harsh consequences, fairly and consistently and constantly applied, to undo that lesson.  

Both of my children had phases of pretending to be an animal--a dog, a cat, a dragon, a dinosaur (oh my gawd the dinosaur was Pixie, and she jumped on Imp and bit him.  Because "dat's whut raptors do. I a dinosaur! RAWR!).  I...put a stop to the dinosaur stuff, but not because I stopped the imaginative play, but because I did not need them biting each other. 

They sort of still play make-believe, but via Minecraft, now.  Other than that, they've grown out of it. 

Leftists...haven't.  I'm not sure if it's because they didn't engage in imagination play as toddlers/preschoolers (kind of hard when they're overscheduled for every second of every day by parents that didn't want to parent their kids), or if it's because they're told that they're bad for being born white/male/cis het/rich/poor/female or whatever.  But whatever the reason is...

...leftism looks, from the outside, like a giant case of Peter Pan syndrome.  Delayed development.  Socially-enforced retardation.  

Call it whatever you will, they need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and let the goddamn grownups actually run the country.  Because trying to enforce kindergarten rules on a grown up world has backfired spectacularly.  If your cunning plan depends on "if people will just..." it won't work.  Because people will not "just." 

I'm personally tired of putting up with behavior that should have been met with a spanking before the little 'tards hit kindergarten age.  

I vote we start calling the behavior like we see it--socially-enforced retardation--and treat them like toddlers: ignore them, up until the point their behavior crosses a line and must be corrected.  

Because that's the other thing about toddler misbehavior: they're doing it for attention.  If we stop giving them the attention, some of them will stop acting out...and some will earn the richly deserved slap-down.

Bugger. I'm an idiot.

So.  I had a health issue that drove me to the doctor, earlier this week.  While I was there, I asked her to switch me back from artificial thyroid replacement hormones (T4 and T3) back to natural (desiccated porcine thyroid gland).

I took my first dose yesterday morning.  And I woke up.  Woke up for the first time in months. 

I had been sleepwalking through life without realizing how bad it was getting.  I just knew that some of the other hypothyroid symptoms that I had had under control were coming back.  I was (and still am) always cold.  My hair was dry and I was shedding like a nervous cat.  I was struggling to slow weight gain on 900-1100 calories per day.  Not stop it, not lose weight, slow the gain.  

So I asked to go back on what I'd felt better on: the natural stuff. 

I still am limited in physical energy.  I'm still stiff and sore in the joints, with jolts of pain if I push too far. 

But I can think.  My brain's working again.  

I feel like an abject moron, putting it off for so long.  

(and now, back to my scheduled writing)

Old Fashioned Lard Biscuits

2 c all purpose flour*
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/3 c lard**
2/3 c milk

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Mix the dry ingredients, and cut the lard into the dry ingredients until everything resembles coarse meal.  Stir in the milk until a sticky dough forms, sprinkle flour on a flat surface and turn the dough out.  Knead until it's elastic and no longer sticky--probably about twelve turns.  Maybe fourteen.  Roll out, cut biscuits by pressing straight down, form the remnants into another pat of dough and keep cutting until you've not got enough left to cut and make that last biscuit, and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 12-15 minutes. 

Now.  That's the standard recipe.  

Here's lard biscuits for those who have to be gluten free:

2 c all purpose gluten free flour--I don't recommend almond flour for this unless you like eating hockey pucks
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/3 c lard
2/3 c milk***
1 large egg

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Mix the dry ingredients and cut in the lard--this version of the recipe works better if the lard is COLD lard.  Beat the egg into the milk, then work into the dry ingredients.  Add more milk if needed by teaspoons.  Fold and press four or six times, to make flaky layers in the biscuits, then sprinkle flour over the top, roll out, and cut.  Mash the remnants together and roll out and cut a couple more biscuits.  Continue until dough's all on the cookie sheet.  Bake until golden brown. 

These are, hands down, the best gluten free biscuits I've made.  BEST.  They turn out like soft wheat biscuits--the Southern style ones.  They hold together for butter and honey or jam; they also work really well under sausage gravy.  Best thing of all?  They don't end up so dry you feel like you're choking down formed sawdust. 

It truly doesn't take any longer to mix these up and cut them out than it does for the oven to preheat.  And it costs a lot less than biscuits in a can. 

*I haven't made these with standard all purpose flour, but I can't imagine them turning out anything but good, considering how good they turn out as gluten free biscuits.

**You can use room temperature lard, but cold lard turns out better biscuits.  And cold lard isn't nearly so hard to cut in as cold butter is. 

***You can leave out the egg, if you're allergic, but be aware you're going to need more milk--start with 3/4 c milk, and add more by teaspoons if you need it. 

Budget recommendations

My budget just got a lot tighter.  My son hit sixteen, and there's now a small truck to insure.  

So.  It's time to sort through and figure out where I can tighten things down a bit more.  I'm really, really thankful for my aunt helping me buy a WonderMill last spring--that is an enormous budgetary help.  One 25 lb bag of white rice from Sam's Club costs the same as 4 lbs of rice flour.  4 lbs of flour that I grind and mix costs about the same as a 5 lb bag of all-purpose wheat flour.  

If you have to eat gluten free, get a grain mill.  It makes a huge difference.  You will break even in the first few months, I promise. 

My particular all-purpose blend* is a combination of white rice, sticky rice, and brown rice, with corn starch and xanthan gum added.  I use corn starch because it's a) locally available, and b) much cheaper than a lot of other starches.  I usually mix two batches of flour to keep on hand and cook with. 

I have successfully made gluten free bread, biscuits,** gravy,*** and a couple of desserts (wacky cake and cookies) with this flour.  It's an excellent blend.  The most expensive part of it is the sticky rice, but it's well worth it.  The sticky rice flour makes an enormous difference in how well your gluten free breads and bread-ish things hold together. 

The biggest difference in cost is that mill.  When you can buy the rice and grind and mix it yourself, you're not paying for a massive commercial mill, and you're not paying labor and convenience costs.  And trust me: both add up.  Fast.


*2 c white rice flour, 1 c sticky rice, 1 c brown rice, 1.5 c corn starch, 2 tbsp xanthan gum

**Best biscuit recipe is actually lard biscuits.  Butter ones are...okay, but mildly disappointing.  The lard biscuits turn out spectacularly good, and they brown.  

***Gravy is one of the things that actually turns out better using gluten free flour: no lumps.  (The other thing is breaded and fried foods.)

It's alive!

 Liquid Diet Chronicles book 4 Meals on Wheels is live, and ready for borrow through Kindle Unlimited, or purchase (or first one, then the other, if you're inclined). 

New foods!

It is like pulling teeth to get my Imp to try new foods.  I think I've found the trick though: he's more likely to try something if I tell him it's spicy.  

Case in point: we got him to try pad thai, recently, by calling it "spicy spaghetti."  He tried it, and liked it well enough to ask me to learn how to make it so I could teach him.  

Last night was another new food: buffalo chicken dip.  I started with a recipe found online, but ended up modifying it a little bit.  I'll probably half the recipe, more or less, next time I make it, and will just make it on the stove top.  

Hot Buffalo Chicken Dip

2 cans chicken, drained
2 bricks cream cheese (I used reduced fat, and thank God I did)
3/4 c shredded cheddar (grate it yourself so the dip doesn't turn out gritty if texture bothers you)
1 c ranch dressing
3/4 c buffalo sauce
1/4 c Louisiana hot sauce (optional--if you need more heat to be happy with it)

Drain chicken (my cats demanded some of the chicken water, so I drained a little into paper bowls for them), dump in crock pot, break up a bit.  Dump in cream cheese, cheddar, ranch, and buffalo sauce, and turn the crock pot on low.  Go back in an hour or so, depending on your crock pot (mine runs way too hot on all settings), and start the process of mixing it up.   It's ready when it's fully incorporated and hot all the way through.  It's good with Freetos, tortilla chips, celery sticks.  Probably would be good with club crackers, but I can't vouch for that, since I can't have those anymore. 

The picky kid ate probably a cup of dip, last night.  He only stopped because it was starting to make him queasy (as much cheese as is in it, I'm not surprised).  I had maybe half a cup...and a bottle of hard cider to mitigate the gallbladder attack I knew would follow.  

It was worth it.  This recipe turned out good.

Derp. Forgot to annouce.

 Light Up the Night dropped live on Wednesday.  It's available to purchase, or to borrow through KU.  

Eggs...and abject stupidity

 So.  

Eggs.  

They're something of a staple.  You use eggs for breakfast, for making cookies, for adding into recipes.  Eggs are just...they're ubiquitous.  They're in a lot of things.  They're supposed to be some of the cheapest protein out there.  

We use a lot of eggs in this house.  A lot.  Spouse eats French Toast egg muffins for breakfast on work days; Imp eats fried egg sandwiches with hot sauce for school day breakfasts (and on Sunday before church).  I make cookies, cornbread, and gluten free bread--all of which use eggs.  Two of them, each time.  I also have a recipe that uses four to make a can of spinach palatable (basically turns nasty, slimy canned spinach into spanikopita filling).  So, yeah--we use a lot of eggs in this household. I get them in the big boxes (5 dozen) from Walmart about every three weeks or so.  

I got groceries Friday.  The box of eggs had jumped from $10/box to a bit over $18.  Yeah.  Major jump.  I got them at Sam's Club instead, for a bit more than $13 for the same size of box.  (That had gone up, too, just not as much as Walmart.)  

Yesterday, I ran across a news story about yet another food recall.  I'm sure you'll remember the great lunch meat recall for listeria?  Back in July?  Where they went screeching that lunch meat would kill you because of this particular bacteria? 

Yeah.  When I got pregnant for the first time in 2008?  I was cautioned that lunch meat can carry listeria, and that since I was pregnant, I would be particularly susceptible to it.  And that I needed to take lunch meat I got and heat it to steaming in the microwave, then put it in a new, clean container, before I put it back in the fridge.  And then it'd be safe.    

There was no need for a panic and recall.  It's stupidly simple to mitigate the risks.  All that was really necessary was a public service announcement.  

Back to the eggs.  They're the current recall.  Because salmonella.  

Wait just a damn fucking minute, here.  Eggs have always risked salmonella contamination.  It's one of the reasons you're not supposed to eat raw cookie dough.*  I have never been unaware of the possibility.  And I've never had a case of salmonella from eggs.  Wanna know why? 

I wash the fucking eggs.  And then I cook the fucking eggs.  

Again: a recall is not necessary.  All that should have been done was to draft a PSA.  Here, I can do it for them: 

Attention: this is a public service announcement from the FDA and CDC.  Recently, there has been a multi-state outbreak in cases of salmonella food poisoning that has been linked to eggs.  Salmonella is a dangerous food-borne illness that can be controlled with a few, simple steps.  Step one: wash the outer shell of the egg with soap and warm water before you crack the eggs for use.  Step two: cook the eggs until the yolk is set.  These two steps will prevent you from contracting salmonella from eggs.  We will not issue a recall for egg-borne salmonella.  Thank you.

Then...leave the eggs alone.  Leave them on the shelves.  Stop fucking treating the American public like toddlers.  If people ignore the PSA's instructions and end up killing themselves with salmonella?  Awesome.  Each easily avoidable death is one fewer stupid fucker voting.  And breeding.  And encouraging the government to treat the rest of us--you know, the ones with brains in our heads--like toddlers.  

Stop issuing food recalls for things that the consumer should be responsible for mitigating for ourselves.  Save them for the arsenic-tainted apple juice, or the metal-shavings-tainted chicken nuggets. 

Incoming!

Got a new novella dropping live, next month.  On the 18th.  Light Up the Night. You can preorder now, if it looks interesting:

Dane Crockford is tired. Tired of the green energy crapping out and leaving his wife Rose gasping for breath when their air conditioning dies, tired of trying to hide his use of his own solar panels from the nationalized electrical company, and tired of worrying about his daughter and son-in-law, trapped in an abusive indenture program to pay off their student loans. He’s not the only one, either. Everyone in his home town is in a similar situation, many of them with their children doing dangerous jobs without pay to offset crippling student debt. So when his grandson Toby accidentally discovers an energy generation method that isn’t wholly owned by the federal government, he jumps on the possibility of building something that works, in spite of and around the federal monopoly.

But what the monopoly doesn’t realize is that their grip on Dane, and on his home town, is far less secure than they think. When they disconnect his house from the power grid, they have nothing to hold over him, to force him to work for small rebates on his monthly bill. The utility has unleashed the power of a cranky old man with a rare skill, and they’ve got no idea that they’ve tossed the pebble that starts an avalanche.

When it drops live, it'll be available to borrow Kindle Unlimited. 

There will be more announced in coming weeks, too.  Cheers!

School is back in session.

 Last week was a half-week.  Monday saw "Back to School Night," where the kids take their supplies to their classrooms/lockers, and pick up their schedules (for secondary).  Pixie (who's now much taller than me) is in 8th grade, this year, and Imp...Imp is in high school.  

I'm really, really proud of that.  

I actually wrote this past summer.  Yeah, the housework went to shit, but I wrote.  I finished a short novel, a novella, and am about 2/3 of the way done with another collection of short stories.  

And since school has been back in session, I managed to get the revisions done on the short novel and get it sent out to one of my beta readers.  The novella?  Beta reader finished it, and I've got it up for pre-order.  It'll pop live in mid-September, at which point it'll be available to borrow KU.  

I'm thankful the kids are back in school.  They've got their own friend groups that they hang around with in school, and they don't spend their time abrading each other's nerves...and mine.

Milestones

The kids are hitting them.  They're both teens, now, which means I've gotten them into the adulthood-training stages.  I'm actually really proud of them.  They are, by and large, really good kids, even in the throes of puberty hormones. 

Imp has his learner's permit, and Other Half is working on teaching him how to drive.  Yes, he's really that old, now.  And is going into high school next year, with a couple of ideas of what he wants to do with his life.  He wants to learn welding.  I think it suits him, because it's as much art as science, and it's a skill that will support him quite well.  He also wants to learn to make pizza.  And run a food truck with a friend or two.  We're...working on that.  I've got him started on learning to make pizza from scratch, since that's what I do for them on Fridays anyway.  He can assist me, then take over when I think he's ready.  It'll probably be slightly before he thinks he is.  

Pixie is also a teenager, now.  She's working on learning how to cook from scratch, too.  She can make from-scratch oil biscuits, helps make bread (both in the bread maker and my gluten free bread), cookies, and wacky cakes.  She's still not sure what she wants to do for a job, but that's okay--she's only thirteen.  She's positive, though, that she wants to get married and have a family.  

The kids have four and five more years, respectively, of learning to run their own households, then some more time paying rent in mine* before they'll be moving out.  

Next month is Other Half and my 20th anniversary of marriage; we've been together for longer than that.  

Next February--so, eight months and a bit from now--will mark ten years that I've been on a wheat-free diet.  I routinely test that, hoping that the intolerance will clear up, but...yeah, it really seems like that isn't going to happen.  Last year, I started working on learning to make bread with rice flour.  And then, I started grinding rice for flour, starting with my blender.  Then I got a manual grain mill, and recently, I got an electric one.  I've learned a lot about gluten free baking, mostly in the last two or three months, since flour isn't so very expensive, now.  

Five years from now, we won't be having to save every single penny we possibly can to just be able to pay tuition; at that point, there's a lot I want to do for my house.  Yeah, our tax returns will be less without the child tax credit available...but that has always gone to pay tuition, from the time they started school.  Once it's gone, I won't really miss it because I've never really had it. And while yes, we are planning on donating some to the school to repay them for the years they've given us a tuition break, it won't be on a deprivation level like tuition alone--even the discounted tuition--keeps us on. 

*The rent the kids pay to me will go into a separate savings account, so that they can afford to move out: First and last months' rents, deposits, utilities deposits...it actually costs in the mid four digits for people to be able to move from their parents' home...or from one apartment to another. 

Well. *That* happened.

Monday.  Woke up feeling stiff and achy; day got progressively worse from there.  Doctor's appointment right before picking the kids up from school, got there barely in time to park before Imp was climbing into the back seat.  

Evening went like they always do, and then kids went to bed, and I got a LARGE bourbon.  Because I wasn't going to sleep without help.  The storm hit around the time I went to bed, and hit in earnest about the time I managed to drift off, just before midnight.  

And then the power went out.  And the sirens went off.  We got the kids and pets gathered up and huddled  in the bathroom, listening to a battery-operated transistor radio until the all-clear sounded about half an hour later.

Shuffled the kids back to bed, and Other Half took a flashlight and went out to see if anything had damaged the roof, as best he could.  Still no power--all of the local lights were out.  We could tell we'd lost some limbs from the trees, but not how many.  

Went back to bed, and slept for the rest of the night, until the alarm on the cell phone went off.  

Still no power.  But we had light--the sun was starting to come up.  The driveway had a limb across right behind the cars, and there were limbs laying on the roof.  And on the fence into the dog's yard.  And...yeah.  

Other Half got a text that there would be a delayed start for the kids' school day, and let me know.  Then he headed to work.  I waited, then took the kids to try to get them to school...and the road was blocked.  "Road closed."  And I could see why (both for the road block, and for the lack of power to the area): there were no poles left standing as far as I could see down the north side of the road.  

Turns out, that storm?  The sirens?  Was an F1 tornado.  It went through between the little side road that connects our street to the next big east-west artery through town.  Lots of trees down along that little road, too.  Went down it, around the next street, then up the north-south back street that the college backs onto.  

...and there was a road closed sign preventing a left turn.  No way to get the kids to school.  Dog was out of food, so we went to Walmart to grab a bag.  Went home.  

School closed, Imp's band concert postponed.  Road--and school--stayed closed through Wednesday.  Power came back about lunch time on Wednesday, or maybe a little before.*  Still no internet.  Cable co-ax had been taken out with the power lines. But the power was back, and the city had semi-opened up the road around the school, so...the kids went back yesterday.  Internet came back yesterday right before I had to go get them.  

I'm glad I'd left five minutes early--the city'd closed the street between us and the school again, and I had to go the long way 'round.  

So, yesterday and today have been spent scrambling to get caught up on what I didn't get done Tuesday (dishes and some housework) and yesterday (the admin stuff for the household that requires internet access...and the admin stuff for writing that also requires internet access). 

Since May started, I'd estimate we've probably had about four or five inches of rain, going by the standing water in the low spots in the yard, where the saturated soil just couldn't take anymore.  We're supposed to get some dry time...but not much.  It's supposed to start back up Sunday night.  

Missouri in severe weather season.  Fun times.  Be sure your radios have batteries, your cell phones are charged, and your generators (should you have them) are ready to go. 

*Wednesday afternoon, there was another nasty storm system move through; however, the tornadoes that one spawned were south of us. The kids, pets, and I still spent a good chunk of the afternoon huddled in the innermost room without windows, thankful it was a bathroom not a closet.