| Airport '09 |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|10:29 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Dreamed last night of a multi-legged airline trip through three or four different airports. I didn't dream any of the airplane rides, just the stopovers at airports in between. I'd be at one airport, trying to make a flight; I'd make the line to board the plane just in time, and then the dream would cut directly to the next airport waiting for the next plane.
One thing these airports all had in common was good music playing over the PA. I realized when I woke up that this was due to me falling asleep with my favorite music station playing. Lucky thing I didn't pass out to talk radio instead; airport conversations can be so awkward. |
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| oh you little devils of alcohol and caffeine |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|05:28 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | dust, progress notes | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  smug | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Junior Brown -Broke Down South of Dallas | ] |
I have just discovered Junior Brown, thanks to Pandora. (I just wish it would stop trying to turn this into the All Allison Krause Channel. SRSLY) I mean, I kind of vaguely knew about his existence, but I didn't know I loved him with a deep and abiding passion. Dude.
I also wrote 2001 words on Grail this afternoon, which is pretty damned good for a girl who spent three and a half hours at the gym this morning.
I also did the stop-in-the-middle-of-a-sentence thing, because, well, I want to write the next bit I have to write, and that will encourage me to get a move on in the morning.
Tomorrow night, on the other hand, I will be here:
November 14, 2009
8:00 PM The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County, Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, 305 West Saddle River, Upper Saddle River, Bergen County, NJ
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) batwrangler will be my wingman, because she is awesome, and will drive down with me so I don't die on the way home.
13011 / 100000 words. 13% done!
Mean things today: second-guessing your ancestors, jihads and crusades, fear of alien invasion. |
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| Practice |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|11:29 am] |
In order to do anything well, you must first do it badly. But if you set out to do something badly, that is all you will accomplish; if you're not trying to do well, you never will. So, to become good at something, you must do it badly while trying very hard to do well.
When you screw up because you don't know how to do something well, you look exactly the same as if you screwed up because you're stupid. This shouldn't matter, since you're not trying to impress anybody, you're trying to gain a skill. But trying to do one thing while you're repeatedly doing another thing is a rather confusing state of affairs. If you don't know what you're doing well enough to do it right, how do you know that you are doing the right thing by screwing up over and over again?
When you practice, you're not screwing up for screwing up's sake, you're doing it so you can gain the experience necessary to do well. Experience is a type of information: you use it to tell what the right way to do things is. So practice is only good if, by practicing, you are learning more about the right way of doing something.
A good way to practice is to guess at the right way to do something and try it, then judge where it's right and where it's wrong. It may happen that you guessed exactly right; in that case, practice is the same as really doing the thing, and you have learned that it is still right. That's important, because the right way to do something might change over time and in new circumstances.
In a sense, you can never not practice; whatever you're doing, you're practicing it. But you always need to look for the right way to do it, and pay attention to where it's right and where it's wrong, or else you won't get anything out of the practice. |
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| There's more than one way to bake a loaf |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|03:21 pm] |
Sourdough generally needs much, much longer to rise than a dough made with the standard brewer's yeast. It's not at all uncommon to knock the dough back several times during the first rise - my last loaf, my current preferred process, I gave the dough a five-minute knead and then knocked it back every hour on the hour for the next four hours, before I shaped it and set it to rise for baking.
Right now I am trying a whole nother method, where it starts out mixed but not kneaded at all, and then gets ten or fifteen seconds of kneading every ten minutes for the first half-hour, then on the half-hour, then on the hour.
For some people, I guess this would be intolerable. For me, at the moment, it's all but ideal. I work from home anyway, so being around for four hours is no burden; I'm working revisions, which calls for no great extended periods of concentration; I really, really need to take a lot of breaks from the computer just now, so being constantly called away to fidget with bread is nothing but a blessing to my body.
And it's a fascination to my mind. Bread without hard kneading? What is this about? Will it, y'know, work...?
Also, I knead need a breadmaking icon, if I'm going to go on talking about it. But I need more cooking-icons anyway, 'specially now that I no longer grow chillies. I must take more photos... |
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| UnDonne |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|01:26 pm] |
Send not, to ask for whom the sossidge fries; it fries for Barry.
Apparently.
Even he doesn't quite have the nerve to hook one out of the sizzling pan, but he doesn't think he needs to. He reckons he can hook one out of my quivering conscience.
I am made of sterner stuff, I tell you. I tell him, I tell myself. I am.
*is firm of purpose*
Umm... |
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| Hubris |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|09:47 am] |
Yesterday, they cemented in all the posts for the new railings outside my house - including the one that stands atop my newly-reburied, much-broken media cable.
And then they went away, and lo! I still had internets, also phone and TV! They had managed not to break it again!!
I was so relieved, I almost posted: there being no need on God's good earth why they should need to go anywhere near it ever again, it was safely under earth and stone and could stay there undisturbed...
This morning, they are digging up some of the block paving and relaying it. Some bureaucrat has been by, no doubt, and criticised the quality of their work. Slowly, slowly they are coming closer to my buried cable.
I am increasingly nervous. If I vanish altogether... Well. You know the routine. They shall have made me invisible. |
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| don't expect your good heart to save your neck |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|12:20 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | dust, progress notes | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Janis Ian - On the other side | ] |
1006 words on grail, 783 on some nonfiction. Not too bad, all things considered.
Today's auctorial crisis: Aw damn. After two books, I'm finally going to have to describe this ship from the outside.
My Utopian society is starting to convince me. I wonder what's wrong with it? Other than that it requires lobotomizing the citizens, of course.
I am funnier when I'm punchy. Also, I am funnier than I used to be. I learned this doing readings from BtMB lately. That book takes itself very seriously. It is Portentuous. Despite having been rewritten again and again and again.
This book is not portentuous. Perhaps I have relaxed a bit over the years.
Why I hang around with my writing group: a brief transcript from today's deathmarch support chat:
stillsostrange (12:08:25 AM): Somebody name five demons who stalk the unwary in winter matociquala (12:09:49 AM): famine, thirst, fatigue, cold and Mixed Precip.
11016 / 100000 words. 11% done! |
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| In which we shout - pointlessly! - at Mac |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|06:17 pm] |
It's all my own fault, I know. I just... Well. It's not that I can't learn, only that these particular lessons seem so unreasonable...
There was an Incident last night, in which four eggs got broken. My fault: I should have left the box in the fridge, I know.
One of the four was just cracked, not smashed; I left it in a little container on the counter overnight, reckoning to use it today.
This morning, the remnants of its shell were all over the kitchen floor, where Mac had played his standard trick of knocking it off to break it open. (See above, under "four eggs got broken".) I had thought about locking it away, but didn't really think he'd sniff it out amongst everything else on the counter.
My fault again, I guess.
This evening, I steam-blanched the kale above the rice as it boiled, then set it aside to cool.
And came downstairs an hour later - to give the boys their tea, yet! - to find steaming-basket and spilled kale all over the floor.
My fault, of course: we all know he likes steamed greens. Even so. I confess, I shouted. Which does no good at all, he just stands there and blinks at me, being a cat without conscience. (I'm sorry, that's redundant: it should just read "a cat".)
But. Must I really learn to lock away all foods, on the instant? I can't do that, I cannot live like that. Apart from anything else, I don't have space to do that; and my mind stubbornly continues not to think that way.
Aargh. |
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cheerful
bouncy
cold