Also, before I forget again:

On the sidebar, you may have spotted an odd audiobook title. The Cheese Monkeys.

I LOVED THIS BOOK. It's about college art kids in the late '50s. Despite the lack of computers, I completely recognized the world of the book - I have used those same drawing studios and had the same bizarre professors and seen the same self-indulgent artwork (only I was oh-so-fortunate! to have been subjected to FISH instead of kittens. sigh.)...

Also, the main characters were snarky and skeptical of everything, just like Tom (and a little like me).

Toward the end, the humor gives way to somewhat weird drama, and the one sexual bit is written so waffle-y that I was unsure what had entirely even happened until later - and even then, what the main character thought about the whole thing was totally left unexplained. Authors need to learn to go all or nothin' with this stuff. You can't describe male bits and then decide to get squeamish about the content of a photo.

But apart from that single gripe, I enjoyed the hell out of this book. And the audio version added a LOT to the feel of the thing - I would never have given the female lead such a lofty high-class-snob tone in my head, but that's exactly what she ought to have. I was actually giggling aloud while listening, which is unusual for me.

Sadly, it was very short (only six hours). Happily, there is a follow-up book, which I'm a little skeptical of (because I don't think the female mc should even appear in the "grown-up" world), but I enjoyed this enough to give it a shot. :)

Labels: books, product whoring

 
Tom and I have discovered a weird side-effect of not eating fast food.

It's been a couple of weeks since we've bought fast food. This was largely because we realized just how much money got dumped into it every week, but also for health reasons. [I'm more about the healthy part. Tom's deciding factor was the money part.] It wasn't quite an every-day thing, but three, four times a week, Tom would swing by Burger King, either when he got out of work or when I did.

Now, he's still eating one Subway sub each day, but his body seems to handle those just fine and dandy. (Plus, at $5 for an entire meal for him, it's an awesome deal.) Me, I'm nibbling at more rice and veggies. I baked some muffins yesterday (which, btw, are AMAZING - shredded carrot, cinnamon, cumin, I forget what else; just savory enough to satisfy a craving, while still sweet). I'm keeping more munchable healthy things around the apartment, and not letting myself buy so much candy at work.

Yesterday, since I wasn't working, I nibbled at some rice'n'veggies, had a muffin or two, and picked at bits of things while making a simple casserole for Tom: This is an amazing, amazing little meal-maker. SUPER cheap. I've found the chicken is optional. Salsa can sub in for the tomatoes and peppers. Rice + chicken broth for the boxed thing. Everything but the cheese is always on-hand! Add some spices to the rice to make it more interesting. Yesterday's variations: ground chicken from the freezer that I cooked in a bit of Frank's Hot Sauce, left-over chicken broth from the fridge that I cooked the rice in; cumin, chili powder, ground chipotle; bought some veggies cheap - used half a red pepper, half a green pepper, a jalapeno, a small onion; found sharp cheddar on sale and grated it myself. I had a smidge more casserole than would fit in the intended pan, so I nibbled at it while Tom attacked the main dish. (This is when I found that a light dusting of bacon bits was FANTASTIC, so I added that on.)

Anyway, I got enough food to get us through the week for $20. Little more than I'd hoped to spend (given that I have $50 to work with this week...it was a rough rent-payment this month), but, I realized I have enough on-hand to make a whole second one of those casseroles! woo! (I may even have a chicken breast in the freezer, though Tom reminded me that skipping the chicken is fine.) Plus there's *both* pb&j and ham&cheese for Tom to have sandwiches.


So, point of the story:

While Tom was wolfing down the casserole... he realized he was still *starving* after a bowl. He had a second. I threw a muffin at him. This got him down to "regular hungry". As he filled the cereal bowl a third time, we stopped to consider this. Typically, he'd only need like two bowls, and then nibble at the third for awhile. This third bowl was going to be gone in the next five minutes. (Bearing in mind, the boy always eats way, way too fast. I'm still working on that one.) He told me he's been hungry for the better part of the last week, way hungrier than usual. And he's been eating more.

And then we realized:

His Burger King meals included a big burger combo (burger+fries+Coke) and a second, usually smaller burger. ONE combo meal is likely close to 2000 calories. (Which is why they make me feel queasy - my calorie requirements are something like 1400 per DAY.)

Tom's body had acclimated to that ginormous calorie intake! It was *expecting* to have something like 3000 calories or so, basically every day. (I'm sure it's higher - he'd often do two Subway subs or a sub and a BK. On top of whatever he ate at home.) So even though he's now eating *more* food, I don't think there's anything I could possibly cook him that comes anywhere near the calorie level of a BK Quad Stacker.

Now, listening to my nutrition lectures.. your stomach's "full" message comes from volume, not calories. So we might be able to work with that to an extent. But that won't keep him from being hungry again ten minutes later. "Your body remembers what it *usually* does", the lecturer often repeats. His usually ingests a LOT of energy. I'm sure he burns through an awful lot of it - walking across his store twice is undoubtedly a mile, he's a freaking giant so it takes more energy to just pump blood around, etc.

I need to figure out how to make healthy, HIGH calorie food for him. At least as an intermediary, to slowly convince his body to only take in what it should really need. This is going to be interesting...

Labels: cooking, health, life in general

 
Polishing off the picture-post:


Birthday present from Tom. I freaking adore this necklace. Silver-colored metal wing, copper disc, and actual little watch mechanism in the middle. It matches half my wardrobe, and it was all I could manage to not *quite* wear it every single day for two weeks after my birthday. There's also a matching pin, that has a little jade stone instead of the watch parts.


How pretty is this pattern?? Scarf I made Beth for Christmas, though it was late January by the time I finished it. Alpaca-silk-wool blend, I think. Probably not sturdy enough to handle me wearing it every day, but that's because I'm a spazz.


Yes it is basically that long. My coworker Lucas requested a ridiculously bright rainbow scarf. Draped around my neck, the thing went just past my knees. It is superbright. He loved it, and I freaking loved making it. (Tom had enough issues with that much color being in one spot, I don't think he could deal with me having a(nother) rainbow article of clothing.)


Soooo guess who's incapable of taking straight photos? oh me. But it's our bookcase!!! Hooray! Unfortunately, it wound up being even MORE crammed full than that. While re-doing the smaller bookshelf, I found... two? three? more boxes of books laying around. So the *entire* second-to-bottom shelf is now books stacked vertically instead of running horizontally... and I still had to add a few things to the bin upstairs. I honestly could fill another one of these... and that's still not even touching Tom's ginormous unliftable box of Star Wars books. But we have that whole little section all re-arranged now, and the couch is where Tom wants it, and everything over there is all nice and neat.

Note that there are no pictures of my computer desk area. ^^;; It's still a little scary. But! When tax refunds arrive, I am NOT going yarn shopping. I am going organizing-shopping. I am going to get an actual little drawer-thing of some sort for all my various ribbon paint fabric beads brushes scrapbooking thread pastels etc etc etc., so it will be organized AND accessible. It's not terribly unorganized right now, but, I have to move boxes to get to other boxes and then move everything around again when I'm done, and it's just not fun. Also I keep finding more spools of ribbon, and the box they're supposed to be in is at the bottom of a pile, etc.

The yarn... I'm still unsure about. What I WANT, is something like this:

Okay maybe not eating up *quite* so much wall, but I've seen setups like that in table-sizes, where the top of the bin becomes counterspace, say, for doing art on. But I love the diagonal bins. This is not, I'm sure, practical in my current living space. For now, I have... well, three baskets of yarn that Tom is aware of. I think he's figured out that the boxes beside the desk are largely yarn and yarn supplies as well. Pretty sure he's still in the dark about the whole basket of cotton yarn in the bedroom, which is for the best.

I really don't think a drawer setup is going to work for the yarn. I really like the baskets, but Tom doesn't like seeing all that yarn, while I love looking at all the pretty colors. I'll have to keep thinking on that one.


THAT ASIDE...

I have to stop there with the pictures anyway, because the only ones I have left are belated Christmas gifts that I have not given to their recipients yet, so they're still kindofsortof secrets. The snow down here is currently UP TO MY KNEES, so I may have to wind up doing another post office run, rather than wait until I physically see people. boo.

Labels: apartment, art, crochet, life in general, photos

 
This is what happens when I am asked to edit a story.



This is only two pages.

What you probably can't make out, is how many suggestions and explanations are in brackets after all the blue highlights (which are things to change; yellow are simple additions)...

...

...I had to make a KEY at the top of the file explaining the highlight colors. That's how much of a psycho-editor I am.

I am enjoying the power-rush far, far too much. XD

Mel, I apologize in advance for how soul-crushing this is going to look to you!!! (I promise, I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the story is still amazing. My changes are things like sentence structure. Awkward sentences happen when you're good enough at writing to understand that you *can* mess with sentence structure. Most people aren't. You're awesome. Really. If you were not, I would not spend two hours on my day off to deal with ten pages of story.)

Labels: family, silliness, writing