It's been a great week. In addition to my publishing contract, here's what's been happening:
This should have been a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot - I took the test and applied to be a 2010 Census taker this summer. It's just part time short term, and hopefully will help us build up a little better savings buffer.
We've been making cookies like crazy for the girls to take in their lunch. Here they are frosting the chocolate cookies we made.
The girls both had friends in the local high school production of Oliver, so we went this past Friday. It was fun - even when the fog machine set off the fire alarm during the last scene.
I'll be traveling to Utah this week for work. Looking forward to seeing family and friends. It's going to be a bit of a whirlwind trip.
Pizza crust recipe - there have been several requests, so here it is:
1 package yeast 1 cup warm water 1/2 tsp sald 2 tsp olive oil 1 c whole wheat flour 1 1/2-2 1/2 c all purpose flour cornmeal
Dissolve yeast in warm water in warmed bowl. Add salt, olive oil, wheat flour and 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour. Mix, adding remaining flour until dough cleans the side of the bowl.
Place in greased bowl, turning to grease top. raise until doubled.
Dust counter with cornmeal and roll dough to the size of the pizza pan, then lift onto pan. Top with sauce and meats, and bake at 425 for 15-20 minutes. Remove from oven and add shredded cheese.
As those of you who are my Facebook friends already know, today I signed a contract to have my novel published by Cedar Fort Inc, a regional publisher based in Springville, Utah.
Wooo Hoooo!
And now the real work begins.
They actually made their offer based on the submission I sent in last September, yet I've spent the last three months or so revising and rewriting. The updated story is much stronger. It's also much longer - by about 40 pages, which is how many pages Cedar Fort wants me to cut.
So I've been working on going through and trimming out a bunch of stuff. Not fun. But I have a few ideas how to make it work.
Another thing they asked for is a new title. I guess The Flight of Na Pua Lei doesn't work for them. I've come up with a handful to give them, but I could really use your help - hence on my writing blog, the contest for this month is the title game. So far I have one suggestion - left as a comment on my Facebook blog simulcast. Now's your chance to score some chocolate - contest open through this Friday.
Thanks to all of you for following along and supporting me in this adventure. I can tell the fun is just beginning.
Down in Austin, there's a restaurant called Mangia Chicago Stuffed Pizza. When Kara and I lived there, we just loved their pizza, and ever since we started our Friday night homemade pizza tradition, I've wanted to try my hand at one of these things.
I started by making the regular recipe of dough and dividing it nearly in half. I took the ball that was slightly larger and rolled it out to about 13 inches. I then laid the dough into a 9 inch pie plate.
I then put a layer of sliced ham on the crust.
Then a layer of sausage - I didn't have quite as much as I wanted, but it worked. (Funny side story: I made Anna brown the sausage. She was totally squeamish about the slimy, squishy stuff. I was so tempted to say "It's just a bunch of ground-up pig," but decided that would be counter productive.)
Next came the cheese. From a logistical standpoint, perhaps I used a little too much cheese, as it ran out the sides after the pizza was cut. However, from a flavor standpoint, can there ever really be such a thing as too much cheese?
Then came the top crust, rolled slightly smaller and laid on top. The edges were rolled together. There was too much overlap - the crust looks okay here, but really grew to be a bit too large by the time baking was done.
And finally, the pizza sauce with a sprinkling of parmesan cheese, and into the oven it went.
This is the part where I almost burned the house down - and it didn't have anything to do with the oven.
We don't use our microwave to cook things. If there's a controversy involving food preparation and electromagnetic energy pulses, we're right in the middle of it. So instead, we use it to store our oven mitts. It also functions as a range hood, a clock, and a second kitchen timer.
It was while attempting to make use of this last feature that the trouble began. I punched in the buttons for 25 minutes, but instead of beginning the timer, I hit the start button.
A minute or so later, there was smoke.
The oven mitts got hot - they really were hot pads now. Once we discovered what was going on, I took the whole stack out to the garage, where I noticed one set had melted together and continued to smoke rather heavily.
This is where unlucky could have turned to tragedy, but fortunately I had the presence of mind to take the smoldering mitts out and set them in the middle of the wet grass. The next morning, this is what I found:
Yikes - that could have happened in our garage filled with boxes. Not a good thing.
Still, we managed to get the smoke cleared from the house, and soon we were smelling the delicious Italian dinner instead of burnt polyester.
As for the pizza, it turned out very well. The leftovers aren't as easy to deal with as the traditional pizza, but still an overall success.
Here we go - the first in hopefully a long line of weekly round-up posts.
Alyssa has signed up for the school's Running Club. The group meets together after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays to run. The goal of club members is to participate in the Cowtown Marathon's Kids 5K on February 27th. We did this race two years ago, and I ended up carrying Alyssa the last half of the course. I let her know that I would NOT be carrying her this year.
In preparation for the race, Alyssa got new shoes yesterday. These are the first tennis shoes in forever that don't have a cartoon character on them. (Okay, technically her last shoes had Hannah Montana on them, but I'm lumping her in with Dora and Tinkerbell.)
Anna's latest thing is on-line role playing, where she and a group of friends take turns writing a story, with each person writing a different character.
Kara has been a baking fiend, making a ton of different kinds of cookies. Mmm - yum.
My job is going well. I enjoy it, and they seem to appreciate the work I do. I guess that's what it's all about.
I've lost five pounds so far this month, thanks to (mostly) sticking to my diet and exercising three times a week with EA Sports Active for the Wii. Woo-hoo!
I expect to have some news concerning my book in the next week or two. Stay tuned!
So there it is - the first Weekly Roundup. Maybe I'll end these posts with a funny picture from somewhere around the internet . Something like this:
When I first started this blog back in the day, it was very much a tenuous link to sanity and reality. My life and situation have changed drastically since then, and the desperate need I felt to have some connection to the real world is now met in a number of other ways.
As a result, this blog has sadly diminished in its importance.
Yet I enjoy blogging, connecting with you, and sharing a little bit of our world. So to that end, I'm going to try a new blogging strategy.
I hereby institute the Weekly Roundup - a quick bullet-point rundown of the events of the previous week, scheduled to run each Sunday.
Major breaking events will still warrant their own post.
Feel free to let me know how this is working for you.
It's a good thing regular blogging wasn't one of my New Years resolutions, because, well, I've been a bit of a slacker.
But as with all of the resolutions that I am trying to keep (you know - diet, exercise, blah, blah, blah) I can't dwell on failures, but must keep moving forward!
Last month, my dad and step-mom drove through town and we got to spend a few hours with them. We met at Macaroni Grill, and had a great dinner with great conversation.
Alyssa and Candy had a great time coloring on the paper tablecloth.
Not exactly sure what's going on here.
This is by far my least flattering angle (please see diet and exercise listed above), but it's a good shot of Dad.
Even Kara was able to come - yay!
Then we all came back to the house for a quick tour and photo op.
There - that's the way to do it. I guess I just need to add Regular Blogging to my list of resolutions. I hope everyone is having a great 2010!
I hope your Christmas was safe, warm, and full of only happy surprises. Ours was.
My Christmas Eve started with a trip to the dentist - 7:00 am, to be precise. It's admittedly a strange way to start the season, and I hope to not make a habit of it. But there you go. They did a periodontal cleaning, so they numbed my whole mouth. Fortunately, yogurt in a tube can be eaten even with a numb mouth (as long as you have a good napkin).
I still had a bit of shopping to do - some for Christmas presents, some for the regular weekly needs, and some for Christmas Eve dinner. My first stop wasn't too bad, since it was 8:00 am. However, by the time I finished my errands at around 1:00, parking lots and checkout lines were cram-packed with people.
To top it off, Mother Nature decided to bless us with a white Christmas, and she was in full-force delivery mode. I drove home in some very heavy, blowing snow. Fortunately, the day before had been in the mid seventies, so there was no real danger of snow sticking to the roads. By mid-afternoon, the yard was covered. The girls desperately wanted to go out and play, but I convinced them that snow blowing horizontally at 35 miles per hour was best enjoyed from behind glass.
Our Christmas dinner tradition is to have the big, formal meal on Christmas Eve, and then munch on left-overs Christmas day, so that's what we did.
Throughout the evening, Alyssa would periodically ask, "Where's Santa," at which point she and I would go into the office and check out the Google Maps/NORAD Santa tracker. By the time Santa was headed from Brazil to Uruguay, we were able to get the kids to bed, and then I finished up the present wrapping. I managed to get most of the gifts taken care of during the previous week, leaving me just a half-dozen or so to wrap that night. We got to bed before midnight for the first time on a Christmas eve in many, many years.
Alyssa was up pretty much every hour, and around 4:00 Anna sent her in to our room. Fortunately she was willing to snuggle up and go back to sleep. I walked her into her room a while later, and then went back to sleep until about 8:00! Yes, it was our own little Christmas Miracle.
Part of the reason we were able to sleep in and take a leisurely morning was because the snow outside was even more exciting than the presents.
The girls played in the snow, and I made up a buffet of finger foods designed to replace breakfast and lunch. High in fruits, veggies, and protein, it worked like a charm - quick, easy, convenient, and not a single blood sugar crash all day!
One of the things I wanted to make was a sour cream dill dip. Our dill was in the garage, where it's been for the last few years. I brought it in and started sprinkling it into my bowl of sour cream. In addition to the dill weed, this jar had some dill seeds mixed in. I thought that was unusual, so I checked the label - it didn't mention seeds. So I took one of the seeds into the office, where I have a magnifying loupe, and on closer examination I found that the seed had legs.
I rinsed out the bowl and invented an oregano parmesan sour cream dip to take its place.
I won't bore you with a laundry list of our gifts, but I do want to show you the doll high-chair Santa brought for Alyssa. She absolutely loves it, and has spent hours playing with her babies in it. She even has me buckle it into the van so the babies have a car seat to sit in.
Thanks to all who sent cards and letters and gifts. We had a great Christmas, and hope you did, too.
This is a post far too long in the making, but it's time I get it up here for you to see.
As longtime readers of the blog will know, we here at the ranch are raising guinea pigs. It's a small operation, and with only little girl piggies it's destined to stay small.
We started out last year with Lillie and Duchess.
Then this summer, in a moment of tremendous weakness, I allowed Anna to get a third guinea pig named Mia (or Mina, as Alyssa calls her).
All was fine in piggy land until around Halloween, when Duchess got sick. Her little lymph glands grew to the size of large marbles, and after a course of antibiotics they still weren't reduced. About this same time, Lillie's glands started to swell as well.
So the vet lanced Duchess' glands and gave us a different antibiotic - enough for both Duchess and Lillie. The new antibiotic worked on the infection, but it also robbed the piggies of their appetites. Neither one would eat anything.
Despite our best efforts to nurse her back to health, Duchess passed away on November 30th, and Lillie had lost so much weight she seemed destined to follow.
Kara, however, was determined to keep Lillie alive. For two weeks, she made a mash of parsley, grass, and pellets, and fed this to Lillie with a syringe.
After a what seemed like forever, Lillie finally started eating a little on her own, and now her appetite for grass and dandelions has outstripped the ability of our December yard to produce. And she's gained back most of the weight she lost while being sick.
So, for now, all is well here on the guinea pig farm.
It was an epic holiday project two and a half weeks in the making!
Well, okay - maybe it wasn't really all that much. But it did manage to take two and a half weeks. However, the gingerbread house is now done, and bringing joy and laughter to all who see it.
Here's how it went down.
I mixed up our favorite gingerbread dough way back on November 29th, and then put it into the fridge to chill for two hours. Six days later, I took the dough out of the fridge, and rolled it out onto parchment paper.
I then cut out the five pieces that make up this modernist masterpiece and backed them to perfection.
After the pieces spent six days hardening, I put them together using nasty white frosting made from stale Crisco.
The unconventional design is so the finished product can live under glass.
Then the next day I attempted to move the house to its home on the cake plate, and it totally fell apart.
So the next time I put it together, it was on the cake plate itself. Then last night - finally! - I got the girls together and we decorated.
I mixed up a batch of thick run sugar (powdered sugar and water) and colored it green with some vegetable dyes we bought, and set Anna to work coloring the ice cream cone trees.
I piped on doors and windows, and then laid out the licorice sidewalk. Notice the marshmallow snowmen under the dome. We made those shortly after mixing up the dough. I especially like the little ET.
Then we took turns embellishing with candy canes, Sundrops, and jelly beans - all with natural colors, of course. Even the gummy worms and fruit slices are colored with fruit juice.
I bought enough candy to cover a small mansion, so there is a lot left over. In a fleeting moment of strength, I gave the bag to Kara and told her to hide it - I know I could never keep my hands off otherwise.
Then I made it "snow" on the roof and ground and landscaped with Anna's trees. Sadly there was only room for one snowman, but I think he looks sharp.
Since food smells can sometimes be a problem around here, I designed the house to fit under the cake plate. This will also have the added benefit of keeping the goodies free of dust, just in case we decide to eat the thing come New Years Day.
The girls both had friends in the local high school production of Oliver, so we went this past Friday. It was fun - even when the fog machine set off the fire alarm during the last scene.
