1. Take a tortilla, sprinkle a layer of cheese in the center.
2. Spread a tablespoon or two of the Taco Mix on top (this makes the cheese a little melty)
3. Spoon some salsa on top to taste
4. Add a heaping spoonful of guacamole
5. Arrange a few leaves of the butterleaf lettuce

Fold the tortilla and enjoy. So. Good.

Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

This is utterly terrifying and also exhilarating. I have never done something of this magnitude before, and instead of getting that scared feeling in the pit of my stomach, I’m instead coming at it, full force, night after night, jotting ideas down in meetings during the day, and writing pages and pages every night.

This isn’t exactly new, either. I realized, looking back, that I have been in a rut, creatively, for quite some time now. And it’s been almost a year since I realized that.

It’s funny how re-reading that post is so eerily familiar. It’s not like I really retained those thoughts, consciously. But they’ve been here all along, and naturally, the books I’m writing deal with these themes:

They show the reality of the author who, despite becoming the second woman ever to graduate from Manchester University – and in physics – believed in fairies all her life. “It’s an amazing paradox,” said Judd. “She believed in fairies and in time travel – that people can move in between different worlds. She was both a completely practical, scientific person, and would also talk about ghosts.”

But of course, it didn’t stop there. I didn’t have any sort of creative inspiration or ideas for a while. I had bits and pieces, but that was it. Obviously, the idea of writing a whole, real, entire book hadn’t quite hit me yet, but the fears of writing one had.

And now, all I want to do is talk about the characters and the plots, and the parts that have made me cry while writing it, but I can’t. Not yet. I can’t give it away before it’s done. I just hope that someone out there gets as much from reading this story as I did and do from writing it, but I don’t know if that’s possible.

They taught me things: how to make the rain come, how to make the snow fall. How to listen to the wind and how to be fearless. They taught me words of protection, how to recognize omens, how to talk to the crows, and how to see into a man’s soul. They taught me the seven types of magic, but they also taught me how to be myself. How to become the person I was destined to be.

1. Plot vs. Characters
Too many potentially great (and many classic) stories and tv shows sacrifice plot for characters or vice versa. You can have a great idea for a story, and the plot may be brilliant, but without characters to move things along, it’s just someone going through the motions. It doesn’t work. Alternately, in cases like LOST, where the characters are fantastic, but the plot is a hot mess, the lack of fulfilling plot becomes that much more of a disappointment because the characters are left to flounder.

2. Details vs. Ideas
This isn’t to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but I find that there are two major types of genre writers. The writers that map out everything, to the tiniest detail, so meticulously that they can’t help but include too much information in their writing. Details that simply aren’t relevant or interesting to the overall story, or even to the most avid fan. There’s a place for detail, but there’s a limit to how much needs to be shared at once. On the flip side of this, there’s also a common “let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” strategy to writing, where (especially in tv shows), we find strange and exciting ideas thrown out only to have only a few of them wind up “sticking” and getting carried through to a satisfactory resolution, leaving too many unanswered questions (and too many conflicting answers). A writer has a responsibility to do the homework and the research, to map out the duller minutae of the world they’re creating, but they should never reveal all of their secrets, and give away all the answers.

It’s a fine line of instilling trust in the reader, trust that the story being told will go in the right direction, that it will turn at the right corner, and make its way to the end. Readers need to trust that the story will be told and be resolved, but at the same time, a reader who is constantly pestered with details, proving that the author really does know what’s going on, will find it hard to trust the author.

For me, of course, I want to find that balance between the two, to write wonderful characters and tell a compelling and moving story. I also want to inspire confidence in whoever reads it that the story worth reading, worth waiting for. But really, all I want to do is write it. I want to tell this story, create these characters.

The plot is getting fleshed out nicely. This is a story about time travel, magic, love, adventure, sword fights, saving the world, tragedy, and which dragons have the worst breath.

I’m well into chapter three, soon to start chapter four. Once the first book is finished, editing will begin, and I will start shopping it around to publishers. I don’t really expect that much will come of it. I sort of already anticipate failure, but like playing the lottery, it’s a dare-to-dream situation. I just hope that whoever does read it, eventually, enjoys it. But I know that regardless of what happens, writing it is one of the best things I’ve ever done.

So it comes as a slight surprise that I have a vitamin B deficiency. But not much. I’ve kind of suspected that for a while and responded to that suspicion with a general, “meh.” I’m tired of not really knowing where my food comes from. I’m tired of lack of choices. I’m tired of paying a lot for not much. So slowly but surely, my laziness is being won over by my boredom with insufficient food options.

Of course, making such a change in habit is not easily done, and for me, it helps a lot to have fun accessories. Suffice it to say, I’ve been doing a lot of research, getting some ideas for super healthy meals, and of course, patronizing j-box. I recently ordered a new lunchbox, so that I can easily and fashionably transport my lunches from my home to my place of business. I also got a little tote so that I can actually lug it onto the trolley instead of carrying it with two hands. My god, my life is so challenging, isn’t it? And let’s be honest, I take the trolley entirely out of laziness and not at all out of necessity. Also, sometimes, it is chilly outside and I don’t want to get my feet wet. How spoiled am I? Tremendously.

I purchased the above donburi bento, which gives me loads of options, sections, containers and a handy snap on lid so that everything stays put. Oh, also, I can make noodles and drain them with the handy included strainer. How posh!

I’ve been busy, and when I say busy, I mean, “avoiding doing useful things like cleaning the house, folding my clothes, brushing my hair, actually going to the market, or anything else that might have a tangible benefit to our immediate future lives,” coming up with some easy recipes and rules for eating:

Breakfast (choose one):

Crockpot Oatmeal

1/2c steel cut oats
1/2c flax seed meal
41/2c water
1tsp salt

1. Optional – spray crockpot with cooking spray to avoid sticking.
2. Pour all ingredients into crock pot and stir.
3. Cook on low for 6-8 hours.
4. Add fruit, nuts, and milk to taste.

Suggested Additions:

• Raw walnuts for extra omega-3
• Sliced bananas
• Maple syrup (natural)
• Substitute rice or soy milk for regular milk, or use organic, locally produced milk.

Easy Eggs

I am not a morning person. I do not like thinking, smiling, laughing, talking, cooking, or anything else when I get up in the morning. Consequently, the idea of “cooking eggs” or oatmeal or anything is a hateful thought. Here’s how to make quick, easy, tasty eggs without dirtying a pan:

2 eggs, lightly beaten
cracked pepper and salt to taste

1. Beat eggs in a small, microwave safe bowl
2. Microwave high at 30 second intervals, stirring in between to mix cooked and uncooked egg.
3. Cook until desired consistency is reached, then serve.

Optional Additions:

• Veggies, such as spinach, tomato, broccoli, etc.
• Cheese
• A tablespoon or two of milk for creamier texture
• Knob of butter for creamier texture

And now, the final episode of Lost is on, so you’d better believe I’m out like a scout.

I looked at him and replied, “That’s a bold statement.”

Later that day, some other coworkers were discussing unusual HTML tags, and told me a story about how they’d seen a document that had <smoke></smoke> tags scattered throughout. Belatedly, I asked, “Did you find the <fire> tag?”

I’ve long mentioned my desire to plant a vegetable garden indoors. I’ve grappled with figuring out where and how I would set it up, what sort of mixtures I would use for different plants, how much light I could give them, what types of fertilizer I would need to get, and so forth. The limitations of an indoor apartment vegetable garden combined with the complex needs and desires of such a garden were daunting. I ordered books, I did research, I realized, to my increasing frustration, that the world was patting me on the head and going, “there, there, darling, wouldn’t you like some lovely flowers? Perhaps you won’t kill your next dull potted plant.”

That is, at least, until I remembered that I had done a hydroponic garden as a science experiment in high school (independent study, long story). We’d been given at some point an expensive hydroponic garden, everything included, by someone who’d grown fed up with it and given up. I was able to more than make it work, but in fact make it produce, even without fully understanding nutrients and pH levels, (worse, I didn’t entirely understand the science of which plants needed which nutrients, and as a result, all the plants got too much or too little of what they actually needed).

The benefits of a hydroponic garden are many, but let’s look at how they stack up against the limitations of an indoor container vegetable garden:

Suffice it to say, I discovered that old hydroponic system is still around and fully intact, if unused for about ten years. I’ll be setting up our storage closet in the coming weeks, dusting off the system, replacing necessary parts (presumably a new motor for water filtration), perhaps adapting some new functionality, such as an air stone, getting a sturdy and adjustable stand (and probably some new bulbs) for my light, buying a light timer, seeds, new grow media, pH tester and adjusters, liquid nutrients and a big ol’ floor mat to protect our carpeting.

I’m very excited to start growing a vegetable garden at home! It’s not quite as romantic as I’d originally envisioned, but it will be well-contained and protected, out of harms way, and out of our way, and hopefully we’ll get some wonderful yields!

Ingredients:
2 lbs teeny tiny potatoes, or fingerling potatoes
2 tbs creme fraiche (substitute sour cream if you can’t find creme fraiche)
1 tbs dijon mustard
4 tbs red wine vinegar (use more or less to taste – I used 3 tbs – you can also substitute lemon juice)
4 tbs+ Olive oil

Salt
Pepper

Optional:
Bacon
Green Onions

Preheat the oven to 450°F. Wash and drain the potatoes. Slice each potato in half, long-ways if applicable, then place in a bowl of cold water. Once all the potatoes are cut in half, drain again and return to the bowl. Coat in olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste. Arrange in a baking dish and cover with aluminum foil.

Bake for 40 minutes to an hour, stirring every 15 minutes. For the final 15 minutes, remove the aluminum foil.

In a bowl, mix the creme fraiche and mustard together until blended. Slowly whisk in vinegar, then 4 tbs of olive oil, stirring briskly and pouring slowly until fully blended. Add salt and pepper to taste, and mix well.

Remember to keep whisking!

Potatoes are done when they are soft on the outside and crispy on the outside. Drain off excess oil and spoon into a dish. Add the sauce and stir. Serve warm, or refrigerate and serve chilled. Enjoy!

This recipe was adapted from the one posted on VideoJug.