Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
UPDATE 2025-04-04: This no longer works. Use WFDownloader (although the dev is awfully prickly) and follow the instructions.
And I do mean relative, but for a while, I was doing it one image at a time.
Now, how you organize your hard drive is your business, but I created folders and mimicked my board names.
I love utilities. Love love FLOVE me some utilities. I have utilities for every single damned thing I ever did and do, and some are already built into Windows. I even have a utility to make whatever latest Windows OS look like XP. Yes, really. You will find that some of these are quite primitive and/or aren’t developed anymore. I. Do. Not. Care. They do what I want and when what I want to do is something I can’t do, I go looking for more utilities. No, I don’t want one program with all the bells and whistles. I want one program that does one task well. Read more
What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.
Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.
Well, Dude and my mother liked it. I can’t stand pineapple, so I was having none of it. Neither was XY TD, who ate about two cans of green beans by himself. XX TD had some but she’d been noshing all day and wasn’t hungry (also, she ate all the pineapple I carved out of the middle).
I don’t know where I ran across the “Swineapple” recipe, but it got posted to Reddit not too long ago and immediately went semi-viral.
My relationship with food is like having an abusive ex-boyfriend: He keeps coming back and coming back, every day, even though you don’t want to see him. You want to get rid of him but he won’t go away. It’s not an analogy of “I eat because I have to” and “I can’t really live without him.” It’s that you really don’t want want food in the house the way you really don’t want him to come back. That’s where the analogy stops. Read more
You may have noticed.
I have some things on my mind I’ve wanted to discuss, but my attention span these days is pretty rotten. I’ve been tweeting (and then Facebooking) way too long to be able to put a small essay together in a coherent fashion. Read more
It may or may not be common knowledge that, under my real name, I run B10 Mediaworx, an author services / digital formatting company, which I’ve been doing for the past … mmm … four years. I think. Anyway, before that, I was an at-home medical transcriptionist for six years. I haven’t worked out of doors in ten years.
Well, doing this with babies/toddlers isn’t easy, let me tell you, but once they started going to school, my work life got a lot more productive. And it was so blessedly QUIET. I love(d) working at home. Free and breezy. But a couple of years ago, I found I had a lot more work to do AND I was slacking on the internet during the quiet time. So I started going to the UMKC library on Sundays to work, because they’re open until 11:00pm. AND it was a hassle getting a password for the internet, which I declined to do, because I didn’t WANT to be on the internet. One problem: They aren’t open every Sunday. Well, okay, I could work around that.
Until I couldn’t.
In November, we found out my husband’s employer was closing its Kansas City offices and sending its employees home to telecommute. Talk about a life change. And I do not do well with change. Of any sort. Even good ones. (Don’t come near me for two weeks after I’ve moved into a new house. Just don’t.)
For reasons I don’t know, Sunday, I was cruising Craigslist for office space. I mean, that’s not what I started out looking for. But I found this awesome deal for a little hole-in-the-wall above an old store in an old section of Liberty, Missouri. And it happens to be kitty-corner to the perfect bookstore. (Which is still perfect and I see a whole lot of other people are just discovering the concept and thinking they were original. Heh.) I emailed, as per protocol, but heard nothing. My husband had Monday off and said, “Well, why don’t we go up there and see what we can see?” Well, why not, indeed. I took my checkbook, just in case.
An hour later, I had an office. 140 ft2 of rehabbed historical building on Liberty Square, across from the courthouse, down the street from Jesse James Bank Museum, with a door and a lock and, most importantly, NO BOSS.
Today, I started moving in.
And I am ridiculously giddy.
There’s nothing special about this and there is no weird story behind it like yesterday’s; it’s just a childhood favorite I haven’t made in years. However, we had a block party Saturday and thus I bade Dude to purchase the dreaded pork’n’beans.
Okay, it’s really macaroni salad and about as ubiquitous as can be, but there’s a story behind the title.
It was 1980. In Kansas City. In the summer.
And we did not have air conditioning. No, we did not. But my grandmother, who lived about four blocks away, had a little window unit, so every afternoon, we would hie ourselves up there to sit in her living room for a while, then come home to sleep. If you can call it that. (Oh, and a little trivia: My room faced east, so I had the joy of the first blast of heat every morning.)
My mother would make dinner that we would bring to grandma’s while we sat in the cool. And one day she made this:
As you see, it involves a stove and boiling water. We three children (12, 6, and 4) were lined up at the door waiting for mom to bring the ginormous stoneware crock full of this so that we could go to grandma’s. Unfortunately, two steps from the front door, she tripped, dropped the bowl (which broke), and sprayed macaroni salad and clay shards everywhere.
My brother laughed.
He, um, got in trouble. (Turrble turrrrrrrrrrrble trouble.)
Hence the name. I don’t think my mother’s made this since and I have only a couple of times, but I love it and thus, the block party Saturday was graced with TWO dishes out of the Dude-and-Mojo household.
That’s what the fresh concrete in front of our beautiful porch says: Dude + Mojo = ?
Got a wild hare to be a real mom for a minute and a half, which involved preparing freezer meals of things I like but the TDs will not eat because it didn’t come from McDonald’s, Subway, or Sonic. What I have planned for the freezer are side dishes, not the entrée, so for today’s entrée, I made chicken rolls, which they didn’t like any better than they like anything else I make. Because I am not McDonald’s. (FYI: They went hungry.)
I have no real history with this dish to legitimately call it a “comfort food,” but goodness they were good!
Next time, I’m going to up the cream cheese and not cook them quite so long. I served it (heh, only to myself) with green rice, which recipe used to be a comfort food, but one I now have little taste for. I don’t know why.
[2025-07-30: I have since learned that if it has meat, it’s not technically1 “marinara.” It’s just “spaghetti sauce.”
I make this with different measurements all the time because A) it depends on what I have on hand; B) I never measure; and C) I can’t be arsed to write it down. This is how I made it today, and all measurements are approximate:
If I have stewed tomatoes on hand, I’ll use those. If I have whole tomatoes on hand, I’ll blanch, peel, and use those. I don’t use olive oil because I think the beef provides all the oil necessary, and I’m not a fan of olive oil anyway.
As we all know, this is a heavy dish. When I’m low-carbing, I can have a bowl of it for breakfast (yes, I said breakfast) without the pasta (with parmesan) and I won’t have to think about eating again until bedtime. No matter how much I love it, though, I will never get over thinking it’s weird to eat it without the pasta.
It freezes well, and one of these days, if I ever get around to learning how to can, this is the first thing I’m going to can.
This is my office right now:
It doesn’t look organized, but it is. It’s organized two ways, and one is more effective than the other.
You see, the (1) clutter demands attention and for good reason: It’s important. Stuff I have to do. Stuff that, if I file it neatly away in the (2) three-ring to-do binder buried underneath all that mess, I will forget about and never do and screw up my life.
The goal is to not screw up my life.
But what about filing? you ask. Eh. Filing is for stuff you have to keep but rarely use: tax returns, vendor catalogs, vehicle and health and vet information. Stuff like that. If I had my ’druthers, I’d be able to stick it all in a file box like the one I keep my year’s tax receipts in after I’ve entered the bucket full of receipts into Quicken.
tax file
tax bucket
the official filing cabinet
What about tossing? you ask. Yeah, what you’re looking at is after having ruthlessly tossed and shredded. Trust me, I get rid of whatever I can the minute I lay hands on it and determine it’s worthless to me.
So after ruthlessly tossing-and-shredding, and piling things on my desk in a way that will remind me of its importance, the best way I’ve discovered to not screw up my life and still stay clutter-free is to hang all the important stuff up on the wall.
This demands cork. Or steel/whiteboards magnets. Something. Just get it off my effing desk! I want elbow room and work space. Throw in some effective cord management.
Stylishly.
I want style.
Because there is no style here. I can stick pins in the sheetrock all day long and it’ll do the trick, but I want some style. Martha Stewart Living style. Only more realistic. And cheaper.
So what I’m working on in my organizational efforts is to find a stylish way to hang all my stuff on the walls where I can see it at a glance without boxing myself into a stylish but useless and expensive space.
But I can’t even decide on a paint color.
The DDJ has been a little slow lately, and I’m mostly caught up on B10 Mediaworx business (repeat: mostly), and I need to work on my other creative business. However …
… I also need to do some things to my house, keep it clean (because it’s driving me nucking futs and I can’t work in this mess anymore), and not feel so lost on days my DDJ is slow.
So I’m going to need to implement a routine. I could use the one my hyperregimented mother used while I was growing up. I could do Flylady (and I haven’t seen a more horribly organized website since Geocities). I’ve hung out at Organized Home and I like it. But in the end, I’m going to have to establish my own routine and lemme tell you. I am the least regimented person in the world, especially when my to-do list and the ideas flowing through my head start to overwhelm me.
I usually cope by throwing stuff out. STUFF MUST GO!!!
For some reason I don’t know, I always start these projects in the refrigerator to tackle those nasty glass shelves.
I’m going in. Pray for me.
1. Finish Magdalene.
2011: Widowed Mormon bishop and steel magnate Mitch meets corporate restructuring specialist Cassie St. James, a former prostitute. As they navigate a relationship, they work together to stop a man who’s destroying everything Mitch holds dear.
2. Make some pretty things.
a) An afghan (Tunisian crochet, the only kind I like) for XX TD.
b) A Hobbes doll for XY TD.
3. Get better at the ebook formatting thing.
a) Continue self-tutoring in SVG so I can get The Fob Bible completely digitized (text, no problem, but it’s graphics heavy).
b) Give more priority to embedding fonts.
4. Shamelessly rip off RJ Keller’s 2010-in-photos idea.
5. Get my foyer, living room, and dining room decorated and my art up on the walls, including my kitschy matadors ~1950 and my cheap bought-out-of-a-car-trunk-in-a-parking-lot-but-expensively-framed Pissarro.
6. Expose my real identity to you all (in case you haven’t figured it out already and no, my real name is not famous in the least bit) and my artsy-fartsy business because I think you might like it. But to do that, I need to work on the super-outdated website.
7. Get The Fob Bible into college curricula, where I think it belongs best.
8. Implement some fun ideas I have for The Proviso et al.
9. Get back on the low-carb wagon, exercise, and load up on the probiotics/coconut oil.
10. Sit down and relax, watch a movie with Dude once a week or so.
There. I fixed it.
I grew up with this being served only on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. It was a magnificent treat. For the most part, I still keep that because, well, it’s loaded with sugar and, wow, I could drink a quart of it every day.
Anyway, I had it for my wedding reception and Dragon Lady told me later it was the best punch she’d ever had with another sweet (cake, etc.) because it didn’t clash and/or leave an aftertaste. Now, I don’t know how much that had to do with the punch as much as it had to do with the fact that I wanted vanilla and almond flavoring in my cake icing, but she loved it so much she got her niece to serve it at her wedding reception, where, apparently, it went just as well.
The secret is in the vanilla-and-almond combination.
Part of my TBR, but a fraction of my library.
Most of the middle shelf (with the Laura Ingalls Wilder) I’ve read and re-read.
Notice the MMP romances are stacked two deep.
No, you’re not imagining it.