Twenty-Four Thousand Eight Hundred and Seventy-Three

That's how may words I have to write in the next five days to make my (set months ago) goal of making it fifty-thousand words in the book I'm working on by the new year. (That should get me up through the Italian restaurant dinner, the people who think they're hunting vampires, the reality show celebritard,  and the guy from the EPA. Also, at least two more squid attacks. Maybe three.) I have the entire week off from work and I plan to spend every day latched to my computer*, writing my little heart out, chasing down my artificial deadline.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to make it.


UPDATE: I'm not going to make it.

UPDATE II: I didn't make it.


*Except for tomorrow afternoon, when I'm getting together with Abigail in the city. Also, lunch.

I'm Not On a Boat

Unless you're reading this at some point in the future* when I am. But for the moment I remain landlocked.

The cruise was a lot of fun, if a little on the cold and wet side, and I will get into that presently** but it's almost Christmas and it doesn't seem like the time. So for now I'll just leave you with the knowledge that the trip has been completed, and that spiced rum combines quite nicely with Coke.

*Or, less probably, the past.
**Also, the rather significant issues I have with Princess's approach to customer service, but that's a Whinesday all its own.

I'm On a Boat

Or at least I will be by the time you read this. We're leaving this morning* for a short pre-holidays cruise out of Los Angeles, where it is projected to be raining steadily for the next four days. But that will be okay because, as I mentioned, we will be on a boat. (Or we already are, see above.) If you're good, I'll take lots of pictures and bring them back here to show you.


*Side note: Nine-thirty seems like a perfectly reasonable time for a flight, if you don't think about how early you have to get up to make it to the airport.

Random Product Endorsement: CoverGirl Smokey Eye ShadowBlast

It's like being a corporate shill without all that annoying money!

As an international supermodel* and renowned beauty expert,** I am often asked what products I favor.*** So I thought I would say you all some trouble and tell you about this one before you tired yourselves out asking.

What is it? Basically it's a two-ended eyeshadow stick, with a paler base color on one side and a darker accent color on the other. It's easy to use and the colors come pre-coordinated for your convenience, which is handy for someone who would have flunked out of freshman art***** if art teachers held with any bourgeois notions like grading. There are detailed instructions for the titular****** eye on the back of the package, but I throw those out, since I've ripped them trying to get it open anyway and besides, they're too complicated. Instead, I just slap the base coat over as much area as I feel like covering and smudge the darker color near the lashline; exactly the same way I have been applying eye makeup since the nice lady at Sephora managed to restrain her laughter at the fact that I had made it into my twenties without any clear idea of what makeup was for long enough to explain the basics to me and sell me a bunch of stuff.

So, in summary: easy to use, nice colors, cheap, not a model, also not artistic, late to the party on the makeup thing, summary, footnotes. I think that pretty much covers it.

Any questions?


*Not true.
**I have a mascara wand and I'm not afraid to use it.
***Typically phrased as, "You want fries with that?" But I digress.****
****A lot.
*****Taken as a senior.
******Ha! I am, apparently, twelve.

After a Fashion

Even for professionals, the world of fashion can be confusing sometimes. For example, recently a trend for "bib necklaces" cropped up, and has been doing brisk business among people who, when they wear a necklace, have no interest in doing the thing halfway. They vary from the cute to the ridiculous, but they do have one thing in common: They are all clearly necklaces. However, this:

Is not a bib necklace. This is an actual bib that has been attacked by someone with a bead store, a glue gun and no taste whatsoever*; the sort of thing that a person without a clear idea of how babies work would put on one for a dinner out because it matches their purse. If you wore it, you would look like, well, you would look like this model, only not as happy because you wouldn't be getting paid for it.

On the plus side, if one of your dining companions became enraged at your ridiculous devotion to overpriced trendy junk and tried to stab you with a fork, you would probably be safe.


*I think I just came up with my idea for an Etsy store.

Shoesday: Fasten Your Shoe Belts

Oh Sigerson Morrison*, why can't I stay away from you? I have lovely flats, as many as any rational person could possibly need, but then you have to go and release a style with cool buckles and a sweet rounded toe, and it's all I can do to wait for them to go on sale. But it ends here-- it's this pair and nothing more. At least until these reach further markdown. Or these. But not these.



*And your diffusion line, Belle.
*Also, while I would probably not personally wear them, these may possibly be the sexiest boots known to man.

Air Squid II

I'm not saying why I keep posting links to stories about squid that propel themselves through the air. I'm just saying: plot point.

Merry and Bright

I don't know about you. but where I am it is cold and gray and rainy, and someone is out of Trader Joe's frozen lunches, so she has to walk all the way across the parking lot* to go to the cafeteria. So let's look at some lovely things to cheer ourselves up, shall we?

Pretty!

Shiny!

Sparkly!

Feathery!

Spiky!

Insanity!



*It's a big parking lot.

Shoesday: Jingle Shoes

If you happen to have visited my twitter or Facebook or have been within about ten feet of me in the last couple of weeks, you may have heard about how I just sold my short story "Schrödinger's Cat Lady" to the fine people at Escape Pod, for publication as a podcast and text in mid-January. That would be excitement enough all on its own, but making it even better is the fact that they have become successful enough to pay professional rates for their stories which is very exciting indeed. So, of course, I did what I always do when faced with an unexpected financial windfall, and spent it on shoes.


I love these shoes. They're a great shade of candy-apple red, there's a hidden platform that keeps them from being too high and padding in the footbed to make it possible to stand in them for more than ten minutes at a time.

But the best part (and the problem) is what's on the back:

Awesome, yes? I could never bring myself to get any additional piercings on my body, but I love them on my shoes. And the metal heel is just the right touch of basassitude for the holidays. But there is a problem.

You know what happens when a metal charm hits a metal heel? Clinking. Jingling, even. But that's okay. I figure either I'll where these to a Christmas party and the noise will be blamed on someone else's novelty sweater, or a club and pretend it's just part of the music.

Because, jingling be damned, with imaginary cats as my witness I promise you this: I will wear them.

New Camera!

Rumpole, Pensive

That's right, I'm using the fact that my poor, elderly Canon Powershot s410 finally gave up the ghost as my excuse for why there has been no Shoesday/Thurscheese/etc in the last week, and totally denying that it has anything to do with me being completely lazy. But now I have a new camera, an SD1300, which is a whole 890 plus a D better, so at the very least you can expect a 1000% increase of cat photos.

Although sometimes he moves:

He's coming for you

And his ideas of posing are not necessarily traditional:

Hey, if you could scratch your neck with your foot, wouldn't you?

And, like any good model, he doesn't get out of bed without a sufficient payday:

Kill. Kill. KILL!

(You think this is bad? Just wait until I figure out how to upload from my video camera.)

A Case of the Cyber-Mondays

It's the Monday after Thanksgiving.* You're back at your desk, bleary-eyed and wondering what it is you actually do for a living and if it is really possible for a person to eat her own weight in turkey, when you happen to open your email. Immediately, your eyeballs slam to the back of your head, battered by the force of the sheer number of messages with "cyber Monday" in the subject line. You want to participate, you think it wouldn't be a bad idea to start your Christmas shopping sometime before December 23rd, and you don't really feel like doing any work today, but you just don't know where to start. That's where I come in.

Bloomingdale's: $50 off if you spend $250, sales on boots, jackets, sweaters.
Only good if you were planning to drop some fairly serious cash here, but if there's a big ticket item you had in mind, now's the moment. (A moment, anyway.) And, as gifts of clothing go, a coat is a relatively safe one, given the flexibility of the sizing. Faux fur is kind of having a moment right now, as is leopard-print, so if you have someone on your gift-list who can handle it, this jacket might be just the thing. Or you might think I'm insane, which would be nothing new. In that case, you might want to go with something a little simpler.

Ann Taylor: 40% off everything with the code "MONDAY" today only.
Not so much a gift place, but if you need a dress for an office party you could do a lot worse than this. Throw on a flashy necklace and some heels and you're good to go. And nothing says, "Here, I got you a gift" like a scarf.

The Pre-Thanksgiving Whole Foods Run Checklist

Labwork: Finished
Grocery List: Composed
Loins: Girded
Shoes: Sturdy
Eyes: On the prize
Dates: Consumed
Medjools: Preferred to these deglets
Live and: Learn
Where was I?: Oh, right.
Fire: In belly
Song: In heart
Elbows: Sharp

Okay boys and girls, let's do this thing.

Shoesday of Thanks

Since it seems to be the moment for such behavior, I thought I'd use this time to mention a few things I am thankful for. (I suppose, in the true tradition of the holiday, I should find some Indians to thank for providing my with food, and then send them to live in South Dakota, but I don't know any of the right kind and I think Archana and Hema would just be confused.) Right? Here we go: Good health, a steady job, a steady job with good health insurance, a loving family, a wonderful boyfriend who only gets a little upset when I jab him in the eye first thing in the morning, a car that finally works, chickpeas (my new favorite legumes), a stylist who is capable of giving me a reliably decent haircut for a price that comes in under 'a fortune,' Trader Joes' frozen lunches, red wine, white wine, pretty much any kind of wine except white zin, which is really just alcoholic Kool-Aid, and you can make that yourself much cheaper, the fact that most of the annoying people have been eliminated on Amazing Race, and these shoes. I saw them about a year ago and wanted them SO MUCH, but I wasn't able to pull the trigger in time and they got away. And I thought they were gone for good, until I was browsing Editor's Closet the other day, large as life with one pair left, in my size.* It was a Thanksgiving miracle, just like when the pilgrims thought they didn't have enough turkey for everyone, because Goodwife Hawkins showed up with seven of her nephews and the pilgrims had to scramble to find the extra leaf for the table and borrow some chairs from the Indians. But everyone would filled up on millet bread, and there was even leftover stuffing, which is what made it a miracle.

*Okay, so technically they are slightly smaller than my size, but this is not important. They fit because they have to fit.

I Like My Version Better

Recently, I mentioned to Cameron that really I liked the song "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz. It's fun and upbeat, the sort of thing that would make good workout music, and it had a lyric I particularly enjoyed, about getting ready to go to a club "wearing on my favorite pants." Unfortunately, on a further listening, Cameron pointed out that the line is actually, "wearing all my favorite brands," which is clearly correct (and better grammar), but not nearly as fun. I mean, who can't relate to the feeling of getting ready to head out for the evening, favorite pants on and ready to party?



Other songs I do my own lyrics to:
The Colors of the Wind by Vanessa Williams ("The herring and the otter are my friends")
Bad Romance by Lady Gaga (I've managed to get it stuck in my head with the corrected grammar.)
Kyrie by Mr. Mister
This one isn't even mine; a guy called into a radio show where they were talking about misheard lyrics and shared it, and I liked it so much I adopted it.

Everybody!

Carrying a laser down the road that I must travel
Carrying a laser through the darkness of the night
Carrying a laser where I'm going will you follow
Carrying a laser on the highway in the light

(@Abigail: possible theme song for your lab?)

Thurscheese: By The Book

I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I got an iPad* for my birthday. (I did? Well, you might have forgotten.) And the first thing I did, after holding it up over my head and dancing around with it like Clara at the beginning of The Nutcracker, was to install the Books app and get to downloading.

Because I am cheap, one of the first things I did was to check out what was available for free, because who doesn't like things that are free? And, along with some surprise bonus Agatha Christies and obvious essentials like Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh, I came across the book that may change my life forever.

By Robert Carlton Brown, The Complete Book of Cheese really is just that. Written in 1955, it covers every aspect of the world of cheeses, from culture** to history to tasting notes on the complete range of products, domestic and international, to recipes. For it to be any more complete, we'd have to invent new kinds of cheese.

Obviously, this is going to be a great reference for this blog, especially when my cheese-of-the-month-club shipments start arriving.*** And I will get to the meat of the book later, but as an introduction I would like to share a few highlights of cheese poetry, of which there seems to be a surprising amount.

Guest-Blogging

Someone over at the fine mystery-writers' blog The Ladykillers must have suffered at least a minor  head injury recently, because they asked me to stop by today and blog about the weather. Naturally, I made it about shoes. And gave it a weird title. Please stop by to offer your comments and condolences, and talk about your favorite wet-day footwear.

A Nidiface of My Own

As it happens, I'm a big fan of words. (Pause for Cameron to say, "Really?" in a deeply sarcastic tone of voice.) Big words, little words, words I don't know how to pronounce because I've only ever seen them written. Which is why this project appeals to me so much. It's an attempt being made by the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary to save words that are in danger of being lost to the English language forever, by having people adopt and use them.

I was only going to take "nidiface," which means "nest," but then I saw "Ichthyarchy*" and I knew I had to have that too. Look for these to turn up regularly in my blog posts and twitter, until they either reenter normal usage or everyone stops talking to me.

(If you adopt a word of your own, please share it in the comments, and we can try and come up with sentences for them.)

(Thanks to the Fug Girls for the tip.)

*Kingdom of fishes.

Shoesday: Nature Girl

(I'm sorry the picture is so terrible. My camera has been dying a slow and painful death, and will be put out of its  misery as soon as the new one I ordered from Amazon arrives. My pictures will still be bad, but at least they will be well-lit and in focus.)

I am not, perhaps, the world's most dedicated environmentalist. True, I wrote a column on the subject in high school, cribbing most of my  material from "50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth," but I didn't actually do any of those things. Also, it may have been the only environmental column to ever feature a defense of logging. Anyway, suffice it to say that concern for our shared planet drives very few of the decisions I make in my life, which is why I am feeling so smug about liking these shoes so much. They're from Timberland's new Earthkeepers line, made with non-specifically ecologically sound techniques and materials and rated on a completely meaningless scale of Earthy goodness. But they are also really comfortable and completely on-trend with the whole oxfords-for-women thing, and I love them. And now I really want these too, to wear with woolly tights and this skirt if the weather ever actually gets cold enough.

After all, the planet isn't going to save itself.

To Die, To Sleep No More On My Supremely Comfortable Sealy Posturepedic Mattress

Lately, I've been trying to come up with a way to make a lot of money without doing any work (because, frankly, the other way around hasn't been doing it for me). But rigging the lottery would take too long, and hassling people for spare change outside of Draeger's requires too much human interaction, so I was at a loss. Until I read this post about the hilariously blatant product placement in the soap "Days of Our Lives" and this review of a book in which the author replaces the names of characters in Chekhov's stories with those of current celebrities* and suddenly, my destiny was clear: I am going to rewrite public-domain classics to include paid references to everyone's favorite brands in the text.

I know! Don't you just hate yourself for not having thought of it first?

Obviously, I'll have to work with my customers to determine exactly what books are the best fit for their brands (and budget), but here are a few examples that should give you a sense of the tremendous marketing potential of this new and innovative concept.**

First, something accessible for your mass-market product:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bonus Content)

Jim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place, and had all the traps in the cavern, we could rush there if anybody was to come to the island, and they would never find us without dogs.  And, besides, he said them little birds had said it was going to rain, and did I want the things to get wet?

So we went back and got the canoe, and paddled up abreast the cavern, and lugged all the traps up there.  Then we hunted up a place close by to hide the canoe in, amongst the thick willows.  We took some fish off of the lines and set them again, and begun to get ready for dinner. We was lucky enough to have a whole case of cool, refreshing Coca-Cola Classic with us in the canoe, which Jim said was powerfully refreshing and just what a body wanted after a long day of being an escaped slave.

Sometimes, the text itself presents the perfect opportunity for a promotional partnership:

Ulysses: Enhanced Edition

Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.
—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?
He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:
—Will he come? The jejune jesuit!
Ceasing, he began to shave with care. He slid his Philips Norelco 7310XL across his cheek, exulting in patented Reflex Action System that automatically adjusted to the contours of his face and neck.
—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
—Yes, my love?
—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

And, of course, everyone knows that if you really want to make money, you need an assist from Jane Austen:

Pride and Prejudice (Extended Author's Cut)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a responsible financial adviser from Merrill Lynch, the most trusted name in wealth management.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here shopping for my first private island. How many helipads do you think I'm going to need?


*This took what, about an hour on TMZ and twenty minutes of find and replace? And now he has a book deal? That guy is a genius.
**Like that? It's totally going in my sales materials.

I Am Not Making This Up

You thought I was exaggerating about my cubicle neighbor's insanely sycophantic conversation style? Well, I have here a transcript of the majority of the things she said in about two minutes of conversation that proves that I wasn't:

"Okay."
"Absolutely"
"Yeah"
"Yeah"
"Yes, exactly"
"Right"
"That's interesting"
"Interesting"
"Right"
"Right"
"Sure"


Can I start screaming now?