Checking in to say hellooooo and wish the USians a belated Happy Turkey Day. I have yet to actually do the traditional feast as plans changed and I ended up at my mom’s house with Oldest and BabyBoy, while D and #2Son were at home/running down to see D’s father again. Since my mom doesn’t/can’t eat (and her mom’s stuffing recipe is one of the few things she actually misses eating and that would be hard for her to see/smell and not have) and Oldest doesn’t like anything of a standard T-giving dinner, I opted for a spaghetti feast, with homemade meatballs and garlic bread. Fun, and well-received, but not at all traditional. We’re going back home later today, though, and I’m planning on the whole involved deal later this weekend. Of course, every time I say that, people rush to tell me that I don’t have to go to all that trouble and I’m seriously starting to develop a few cracks in my Pleasant Fuck-Off Reply^TM. Normally I’m better at doing the semi-polite bitchslap to shut down people’s super-wrong assumptions about my life (because, let’s be real, you all know I’m looking forward to pulling together the whole feast, especially in my own kitchen, where all the knives are sharp and the herbs and spices are fresh, and I only know you from the internet--you'd think people who see me on a daily basis might have figured that out, too) but there are too many competing issues going on here (#2’s anxiety disorder, Mom’s health, my father-in-law’s health) and being polite to idiots is pretty far down on the list of things to spend my energy on.

Anyway.

In more fun news, I managed to finish up another part of the Barton farm backstory I seem to be writing:

your hand in mine, we walk the miles, Laura/Clint (obvs), with guest starring roles by Cooper Barton and Nick Fury.

So, yeah, that’s a nice thing to have checked off the WiP list (I’m not done here--my brain has at least 3 more ideas percolating, including the origin story of Black Widow’s arrow necklace--but any little step forward is good by me.) Also, I went out and hunted down an icon for Laura since this seems to be something I'll be revisiting and I hate being unprepared for posting purposes. :D

Are we doing the December talking meme again this year? That was fun last year even if I had to bail two-thirds of the way through and finish up in January. Should I put up a list of dates? You know I like to hold forth and share my opinions about Things…

I mentioned this briefly in my last post, but in my eternal quest not to fall into my usual winter blues, I’m trying to immerse myself in seasonally appropriate things that make me happy. I sort of got the idea from a study I saw somewhere online about why/how there is less depression in Scandinavia than researchers expected, due in part, they theorize, by how the population frames the long winter months as a chance to burrow in and be cozy/enjoy winter activities, etc. We’ll see how well it works in the depths of February, (I do have that Russian/Polish background working, where their method of dealing with the winter has more to do with vodka than enjoying coziness) but I started the plan with autumn and Halloween.

I haven’t baked a pumpkin pie yet (saving that for Thanksgiving), but I did coordinate my viewing / listening with the season.

On the viewing side of things, I hauled out the old favorites of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and Rocky Horror, which were all very comforting in their familiarity. Plus, I stumbled across Only Lovers Left Alive, which fit the theme well enough, even if it’d also fit in with Valentine’s Day. I’m always fascinated by Tilda Swinton’s characters, but this one was surprisingly… sweet, for lack of a better word. And Hiddleston was sort of adorable for a depressed, lonely blood-drinker. So, that was fun.

I already had Dead Beat going as an audiobook, which is set at Halloween and features the King of the Wild Hunt and assorted zombies, which kept my workouts and commutes on theme for most of the month. And then, I found that I’d downloaded an audio version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow narrated by Tom Mison, which was rather perfect for messing around in the kitchen making vampire cupcakes.

So that, plus a big fire in the fireplace on Halloween night (viewable from the street through our leaded glass front doors) were my early autumn efforts toward making the most of the season.

Sorry for the disappearing act -- between my mom's health going off the rails and DragonCon, I have not been home on the weekend for a month, which pitches the rest of my life into a tailspin...

The meme going around seemed to be just the ticket for catching back up (and introducing myself to everyone who's been so kind as to add me in the most recent friending memes, hello!)

What have you been up to? Major life changes? Same old same old?
Mostly the usual--kids, work, school, etc, but with some variations on the basic flavor. #2Son has finished high school (he was the home/online school kid with serious anxiety/depression issues) which is a huge relief, though now he's thinking about community college, so that's new things to figure out. Oldest ended up withdrawing from classes last semester, which was no fun. BabyBoy is teetering on complete disengagement with school, also no fun. We're about to move physical office locations (swank new building (\o/), on the other side of the city (/o\) so all is madness on the work front. Mom's health is always such a house of cards and once it starts teetering, it's a mad rush, which, now that my dad is gone means my brother and I are doing a lot of talking to utterly bewildered doctors (well, mostly we're saying things like, NO. DO NOT DO ANYTHING UNTIL YOU TALK TO THE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL. SHE'S ONLY IN *YOUR* HOSPITAL BECAUSE THEY'RE SLAMMED AND HAVE NO BEDS. DO NOT STOP ANYTHING. DO NOT START ANYTHING NEW. WE DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR OPINION OF [INSERT TREATMENT PLAN] IS. YOU ARE FIVE YEARS BEHIND THE CURVE HERE.) 
So, yeah, it's been fun.

What fandom are you in/do you spend most of your time in?
Still MCU. From the size of my WiP folder and the speed at which I'm writing (and the way the 616 Hawkeyes keep butting their heads in), it's going to be a while before I clear all that.

Where do you hang out online?
LJ/DW, tumblr, pinboard (same fandom name.) Tumblr is where I work out that Renner thing--looooots of reblogs of him/his various roles (well, I mean, there's other stuff, too, but you can expect at least one JR reblog every day.) Pinboard has all my history of fic recs (800+), which I am about to start updating again. Twitter and Pinterest are my real name. I'm super-boring on twitter and pretty domestic on pinterest. Goodreads is partly my real name and I don't really keep it to review books, per se--more to keep track of what I've read and what I have stashed on my kindle, b/c I never can remember that sort of stuff. I'm happy to add you wherever you'd like to engage. 

What are you reading?
The same jumbled mix of romance, fantasy, cozy mysteries and business/science/history nonfiction that I've read most of my life. I should get back in the habit of the Wednesday book meme--I finish books just slowly enough that weekly posts seem like overkill, but just quickly enough that if I miss more than a few weeks, there's enough of a backlog that it feels like a chore to write it all up. 

tl;dr -- my favorite books of the last six months have been Uprooted, Naomi Novik (loved the Eastern European folk tale overlay, so much of what my great-grandparents used to tell me); The Bollywood Affair, Sonali Dev (it had the perfect amount of Bollywood feels for me, plus, the fooooood); As You Wish, Carey Elwes (the PB feels were strong with this one.) 

What are you watching?
Working my way through Daredevil -- the boys watched it all in one go, but I can only take the dark/violence one ep at at time. Poldark -- I watched/loved the original back in the 70s (yes, I'm old) and I am rationing this most recent version. (Team Demelza, all the way, btw.) 

What are you making?
In the office move, we're losing our super-subsidized breakfast/lunch cafe, sadface, so I am gearing up to make my own lunch for the first time in a decade, which is actually kind of fun in this new post-Pinterest world. I think we've just come to the conclusion that the 3 Hobbit movies are not worth doing a marathon complete with food, like we did for LOTR. I am toying with the idea of a weekend of Harry Potter + food. Also, I am tryyyyying to write, but that's been very slow going this year, for everything, be it personal, professional, or fannish. 

What are you squeeing about today?
I am honestly still in that post-DragonCon headspace of fannish love and haven't really come down off the high of answering Edward James Olmos's So say we all with several thousand of my bestest buddies. That, and there are nice new pictures of JR from that education telethon last weekend!

If you could rope old fandom friends into a new fandom, it would be...
Oh, you're all still here and putting up with my comics thing, that's really what counts!

I should really watch/read/dive into _______ and then come talk to you about it!
The big giant event-thing (Secret Wars?) that Marvel just did, so I can sort out wtf is going on now. (Or, y'know, not, and just wait until the next reboot.) 

What else is on your mind?

Disney World (1 quick trip for the Food & Wine Festival in October. A long weekend over New Year's Eve. Contemplating a proper trip with just D & kids, either in April or June. )

Star Wars (I keep telling myself to remember the horror of the prequels, but every little thing is making me squee internally. This was not helped by meeting Peter Mayhew at DC.)

My house is a wreck and I'm tired of it being that way. The boys all need to get drivers licenses. There are outstanding invoices in both my freelance writing and D's coaching/consulting concerns, and I am getting a little aggravated with these people.  The car decision looms. 

It was gorgeous this weekend -- warm (70s/20s) with no humidity and a nice breeze. I got the boys to clear off the deck (pollen and tree seeds are killer around here) and then I cleaned off the furniture (or at least a table and a chair) so I could eat lunch there while I read. I meant to be out there in the evening, too, but I did something to my hip and then sitting out on a patio for dinner in a metal chair aggravated it, so I ended up taking to my bed for the night, boo.

Maybe tonight? The fire bowl looks lonely.

Fannishly speaking, breakfast discussions of Game of Thrones are becoming The Thing around here, as I crash before the boys watch on Sunday night, and then we have to hash it all out in the morning. It is a hell of a way to start off the week. I am blackly amused with how the 'read with your kids! teach them to appreciate books!' has devolved into my needing to call time-out for blood, mayhem and death at the breakfast table. One more in the never-ending list of Things They Don't Tell You About Parenthood...

Also with the fandom stuff, amazon is attempting to bribe former comixology app users into not bitching about not being able to buy in-app now (god forbid amazon have to share profits with apple/google) by handing out $5 credits. I'm still bitching, but I was happy to take their money and pick up an on-sale compilation or two... (Old stuff, Bendis's New Avengers Breakout, which is somewhere in the house in TPB, but which is now happily added to my ipad.)

I am boooooooored with everything I've been cooking lately, so I'm trying to consciously incorporate different things into my routine and I figured I could share any successes. This isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but it's cheap and easy and not outrageously unhealthy -- Broccoli & Cheddar Mashed Potato Cakes. (That's an actual recipe, though it works pretty well to just throw an egg into leftover mashed potatoes, then chop up some broccoli & cheese and mix it all together before coating the cakes in panko and frying them until they're all crunchy on the outside.) #2Son & I didn't even eat any of the chicken that was the rest of the meal.

::squints:: okay, I think that's it for today, ciao, bellas

I haven't fallen off the edge of the world or anything, I'm just really behind on everything fannish and am trying desperately to avoid spoilers in multiple fandoms.

But! we're back from spring break and I have plans to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier this weekend, so that should alleviate some of the craziness. (I'm seriously not checking in anywhere, not even fb.)

Anyway. Disney World is still there and for the Disney-philes on my flist/circle, I will add that the new Festival of Fantasy parade at MK is fabulous (semi-decent pictures here and here on tumblr; having lunch with an Imagineer is pretty cool even before you add in good food at the Brown Derby; and Morgan Freeman now narrates the updated, actually-bearable Hall of Presidents presentation. No naps were taken! This trip turned into the restaurant tour, which you all know is not ever going to make me sad, so that was fun, too. (It's hard to top a window seat at the California Grill on a clear evening, but Be Our Guest gave it some good competition. I'll never eat at the Castle again. Also, the Kobe burger at Yak & Yeti is seriously awesome--yes, D orders burgers everywhere, but you knew this already. I think I have to give the lowest marks to Le Cellier, which was not bad, just didn't knock it out of the park food-wise and had nothing atmospheric going for it.)

Alsoalso, the third-party vacation club broker worked out perfectly, which let us snag a savannah view studio at Kidani Village for approximately the price of a moderate-resort room. Many thumbs up and I'll be happy to provide links if somebody is thinking about taking the plunge.

Actual fannish content to follow soon, promise!

Ciao, bellas!

SnowJam 2014, v. 2.0 has kicked off with sleet and freezing rain this morning. No school and I'm working from home, so yay for getting to turn off the alarm clock last night. I started the fun-cooking last night with Snickers Chex Mix, which is ridiculously OTT and addictive. BabyBoy has already requested it for Beach Week.

Today, I think I'm going for cupcakes with nutella buttercream frosting. (I am, btw, also concocting real food, but that's not nearly as fun as the lineup of sugar-highs I've got planned out.)

At least this time I don't have crazed deadlines at work (nothing is more fun than trying to hack together a publishable guide from bad PDF sources while the power keeps going up and down like last time.) I might even get all the holiday stuff put back in the storage room (it's all down, but half of hit is still strewn across the pool table, which is probably going to become hot property if the power goes out and the boys need non-electronic entertainment options.)

My life, so exciting...

monday, rainy, 40 degrees F/4 Celsius -- I know half the country is snowed in, but ugh.

I see that today is Adm. Grace Hopper's birthday (107, to be precise.) My favorite part of her legend (a true part, even) is how she used to hand out "nanoseconds" -- a piece of rope about a foot long that was the distance light would travel in a nanosecond. For all you youngsters out there, this was an issue because, in the pre-integrated circuits world, this would have severely impacted the size/speed of computers and GH was on a crusade to explain this (and many other things.) I had a prof in college who'd met her at a conference or something and kept his little loop of a nanosecond hooked over the blackboard in his office (yes, I'm old enough to pre-date cheap/available whiteboards.) I think that gives me 2 degrees of separation from her, right?

eta: Courtesy of sarah, Herself on Letterman, complete with nanoseconds and bonus picoseconds

Also, as we enter the second week of December, with the holidays staring me down, it is time to haul out the Embrace Imperfection icon (w/seasonal lighting effects) just to serve as a reminder.

random things:

Somehow (I suspect being packed into a tiny church with 200 other people for the funeral) I have a cold. It is, of course, the first day I can remember seeing blue skies in weeks and I am huddled under my quilt. bleh.

Oldest and I hung out and watched Hansel and Gretel: Witchhunters a couple of days ago, which was kindof fun. A little too bloody for my taste, especially since I felt like it wasted more than one potentially interesting plot point in favor of yet another exploding head. ( spoilers )

The boots they were wearing were awesome, though. :D

My mother has been giving me these sad-puppy eyes about how I don't ever get to write anything fun (because I'm not writing novels for publication) for the last few years, so this spring, I figured out how to edit an ePub, fiddled with you need a rock not a rolling stone (where "fiddled with" == "rewrote all the sex scenes to be not explicit, because: my *mother*"), explained the basics of fan fic, and put the file on her iPad right before we finished up Beach Week. Nerve.Wracking.

We have a slightly intimidating (for me, at least) number of cosplays in the works for DragonCon and 6 weeks to finish them up.

1. Oldest is doing Fraction/Aja's Hawkeye and Hawkeye with one of his friends. There is an outside chance that another one of his friends (who is Russian and a redhead) will do Natasha with them and a more likely chance that L's boys will be Tracksuit Mafia-types. Mostly, we just need to track down purple sneakers for this, as he is all over the ratty jeans/t-shirt combo in RL.
   
2. BabyBoy, #2Son & I are conspiring to be the young Redmond, Blutarch and the Administrator from Team Fortress 2, if I can find a purple suit. Still need bowlers and ribbon to trim/make string ties for the boys.
3. #2 (who is the Maker Boy around here) is experimenting with inflatable octopi to see if we can adapt an existing steampunk persona of mine for something out of Walking Your Octopus: A Guidebook to the Domesticated Cephalopod.
   
4. Oldest has something else going on, too, but all I know is that he needs a black suit and red hair dye. Getting the hair dye out is going to kill him, though he doesn't quite believe that.

::eyes list, tries not to just quit now::

...and finally, back to clearing out/sharing bookmarks and favorites:

Couldn't Get That Boy To Kill Me, by redbrunja, Avengers | MCU, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff, ~3200 words, Explicit === I love the jagged edges in this and how they fit together.

All You Have To Do Is Open Your Eyes, by torakowalski, The Losers, Cougar/Jensen, ~5500 words, Explicit === Cougar doesn't talk, but Jensen understands perfectly.

My living room is almost de-holidayed--I am both sad (I like my winter lights) and relieved (all the stuff I shift out of there to make room for the 9-foot tree and the *cough*mutter*mumble*-dozen Dept 56 houses always ends up just stuck in my bedroom, so it is nice to get it all back on shelves where it belongs.)

On to the real, actual de-cluttering. (That sentence should probably be punctuated with an exclamation point, but as much as I would like to find a house under all the Stuff we have, I am not at all enthusiastic about the process. Which is why we're in this mess in the first place, I guess. sigh.)

What-I'm-Reading Wednesday

Originally snagged from musesfool and passed along to ariadnes_string. We can make it a thing!

What I'm Reading

Persuasion, Jane Austen. I finished up a few things and this was sitting on my iPad and it's been years and years since I last read it, so off I went to Bath.

Roselynde, Roberta Gellis. Medieval romance with pretty impeccable historical details.

The Tempest, Shakespeare. BabyBoy & I are going to see this performed at the Shakespeare Tavern this weekend & he always enjoys it more if he knows the story.


What I Just Finished

Dark Road To Darjeeling, Deanna Raybourne. Julia and Brisbane remain stupidly in love, which is about all I care about. Just as I'm about to swear off their tiresome power struggle, Brisbane gets a migraine, Julia takes care of him, Brisbane lets her, and I'm good for another hundred pages. I did think the death count was a little high in this one, though.

Richard III, Hamlet, Shakespeare. The joys of homeschooling a teenager. (The BBC adaptation of Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart made reading along an utter joy, I must say.)

Lusitania: Saga and Myth, David Ramsay. Again with the homeschooling.

A Lady Awakened, Cecilia Grant. I did give this one a little bit more of a try, but no go, so DNF (and the sequel A Gentleman Undone is going to be DNS.)


What I'm Reading Next

The library is holding a pile of things for me if I can manage to get there during their reduced operating hours: Wonder Show, Barbara Rodgers Barnaby (YA traveling carnival mystery set during the Depression); The Secret of the Pink Carnation, Lauren Willig (which I've read before, but I ended up with some of the later books in the series and thought I'd refresh my memory); Something Like Normal, Trish Doller (YA PTSD vet romance--I am dying to see if she can pull that combo off); The Billionaire's Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace (foodie book club). yikes.

/o\ The AC at the house died yesterday, ack.

\o/ D knew a guy. He came out at 7 to fix it. Then we went for margaritas & fajitas while the house cooled back down.

/o\ Today, there has been hail. Mutant golfball-sized hail. Yay for summer in Georgia?

\o/ \o/ \o/ \o/ exmanhater has recorded a podfic of Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and Sugar Shock, all 42K words, blessings be upon her. (3.5 hours, yikes!)

You can find her post with links for assorted file types here: http://amplificathon.livejournal.com/1477676.html

I will end on that high note.