Not a lot of posting lately, as I’ve been (and still am) up in the Pacific Northwest visiting family and friends. It’s been great catching up with everyone, and the trip has been a good escape from the 100+ degree heat we’ve been getting down in Austin.
Hiking at Mt. St. Helens with my brother, his girlfriend, and my dad (who took the picture):
Ocean Waves:
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Lots of cooking today, starting with mango salsa. I’ve photographed the finished product before, so today I decided to try my hand at composing a still life from the ingredients: mango, red pepper, red onion, cilantro, lime juice, salt & pepper.
As promised, here is a post about apple upside-down cake:
It all began several days ago, when I made banana bread. I thought to myself, “What would make this banana bread better?” The answer, of course, was maple pecan butter. Flavored butters are very easy to make. For this one, I pan toasted some lightly salted chopped pecans. Then I mixed the pecans with a couple tablespoons of maple syrup and most of a stick of butter. As I suspected, it was …
My original plan for this weekend was to go out to west Texas and see the observatory (Peter’s been out working at the telescope there), but I caught a bit of a cold, so I ended up being home instead. To amuse myself, I took a series of photos of paper umbrellas, which I think came out pretty nice:
There are several other shots on flickr, including a few featuring gummy bears:
I had half a steak left over from last night’s dinner. A bit of rummaging through the fridge turned up some spreadable swiss cheese, pesto, roasted red peppers, and an English muffin. So for brunch* this morning I had an open-faced steak sandwich.
* It’s brunch because it’s too early in the day to call it lunch, and I skipped breakfast.
I spent the first half of May completely and miserably stuck on my novel. There was something fundamentally wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what that something was. So for the first week of May, I tried to push through and continue writing. The words came slowly, and they were awful. Then, on the suggestion of tinaconnolly I spent several days not writing. This had a much better result, in that I figured out what was wrong with my novel:
It isn’t actually a novel. It is a collection of stories centered around a common theme. …
I just got an acceptance from Shimmer for my short story “Firefly Igloo.” What a lovely way to end the weekend!
Maintenance had to come in and do some routine work on my apartment yesterday (replacing some of the outlets in the kitchen, or something like that), and rather than listen to them bang around, I decided to go out and do a little photography:
I like some of the pictures I got, but the session may have been a mistake — I got perhaps six or seven decent pictures, but I got ELEVEN big red itchy bug bites. And I was only out for an hour! …
I haven’t put up a lot of pictures of food lately, but Saturday night I went to a lovely gathering with tacithydra, jess_ka, and ellevate. ellevate brought a fruit tart, and jess_ka brought star fruit, which means I got to eat this:
(It was delicious.)
10433 / 100000
Total words: 15,530
Total usable words: 10,433
Badges earned (since the last post):
Gold Star – For completing the April Challenge of 12k words in the month of April.
For completely scrapping at least 1,000 words and redoing them.
For mentioning a duck, goose or other waterfowl somewhere in your novel.
For completing a chapter that’s a prime number (Ch. 3)
For writing 500 words and working out for 30 minutes every day for a week.
…
