Monthly Archives: December 2010

SO, I do this every year, and here goes:

Resolutions from Last Year that I successfully kept:

• Exercising. I’m up to almost-daily, and overall I think I’m doing pretty well health-wise. I eat healthy (though sometimes I know I don’t eat enough) and though I still need to lose some weight, there is muscle underneath the padding now. Which is sort of weird. I’ve never had muscle like that anywhere that wasn’t my legs (from dancing) before.  I also like myself now, most of the time, which is a rather foreign concept and something I didn’t think would ever happen.
• Writing daily. I kept my 1000 word per day goal all year successfully, and even increased it to a 3500 word per day goal during NaNoWriMo without it interfering too much with the things I have to do.
• Started learning to draw.  I’m getting pretty decent with figures, especially once I scan in my initial pencil drawing and start cleaning it up digitally.  I’m still having trouble with putting them in actual settings, thanks to some difficulty with perspective.

Resolutions for This Year:

• Start actively marketing my short stories more to more varied and traditional markets, instead of relying on the easy sell places I’m most familiar with.
• Edit my NaNo novel, get it out to beta readers, and start shopping around for an agent.
• Actually keep up with the housework instead of letting it go until it takes me three days of hard labor to get everything semi-organized again.
• Try to find a way to make a bit more money so I’m not spending so much energy despairing at the state of my bank account on the weeks I have to pay my big bills.  Be it crafting or cooking, I have some skills that could be marketable for the purpose of making at least a little more pocket change. Probably the most viable option would be crafting and an etsy shop.

So . . . I’m experiencing a bit of a post-holiday funk and can’t think of anything to write, and this meme actually seems like a good one for spurring the writing juices. I’m unashamedly stealing it from my twitter-buddy @pikestaff, who stole it from someone I don’t know at Livejournal.

2000-2010:
A decade in review meme

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years! These meme exists to highlight everything that made us who we are over the last ten years. Feel free to fill this out and send it around!

Original + copypaste code can be found here: tehrin
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Finally, and against all odds, Congress has stepped up to the plate and given the GLBT community a first step toward equality and repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

I don’t pretend to think that this changes everything, but it is a step in the right direction, the first of many.

For those of you following the Trevor Project’s It Gets Better videos, particularly those among the GLBT gaming community, EA Games has put out a wonderful  It Gets Better video from its GLBT employees.

Perhaps the most important theme these people repeat is that sometimes you learn that the things that make you different are the things that are most important – something that could apply to everything that makes you different. It’s something I’ve found to be very true, especially when it comes to my geekiness.  Non-geeks may not be able to understand what fascinates me so about computers or video games or the internet, but it is often nice to know that the very things they don’t understand are what make me essential.  Because these things make me look at the world from a different angle, through a different facet of the prism.

As much as I may disagree with EA Games general corporate practice of putting excessive and restrictive DRM on their games, these are the creators and artists involved in those games, not the distributor who publishes them. People who have had a hand in the creation of games that I have loved and enjoyed, and they could not have done what they did without being a little bit “different.”

Being normal will do nothing to set you apart from others – being different can often mean being something a bit extraordinary.

Related articles

• Lady Gaga, celebs celebrate ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ win (hollywoodnews.com)
• Lady Gaga, Neil Patrick Harris take to Twitter to celebrate DADT repeal vote (latimesblogs.latimes.com)

I love trees. Cinnamon is by far my favorite spice, for sweet and savory dishes. (Try cinnamon in a beef stew sometime. Only the chef will know where that nice, fragrant smokiness comes from.) I enjoy putting up holiday decorations, even if no one will see them but me, the Boyfriend, and the cats.

I do have to admit that I put up the tree mostly for the cats. With one exception, my cats tend to view the Outside as Something Scary And To Be Avoided. (And the exception, the spoiled Big Man of the House, really would rather be curled up next to the heater when it gets cold, thanks.) But, the cats love the the month when the trees come inside. They don’t try to climb it, fortunately. They’re too dignified for that. Instead, they curl up in a mass Kitty Ball underneath all the sparkles and that remains the favorite sleeping spot for the remainder of the season. Who needs a tree skirt, when you’ve got four cats huddled around the trunk?

But the holidays for me are all about the food.

See, I never realized how much I love to cook until I moved out of my mom’s house. It’s become a hobby, and a bit of an obsession. I really love to bake – there’s nothing quite as satisfying as the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the house – or cakes, or cookies, or muffins, or scones. But I don’t get many visitors, other than my mom or the Boyfriend, so I don’t get to cook for other people very often. I take baked goods to work quite often (usually to a chorus of “Awww, but I’m on a diet! . . . . I’ll have just one then . . . “) but the holidays give me an opportunity to bake for a crowd, as it were.

As much fun as baking for myself is, it’s always more fun to bake for someone else, to share in the fruits your labor. Since I’ve rather successfully changed my diet for the healthier in the last few years. I do not allow myself to bake sweets just for me.

What is your favorite baked food of the holiday season? Your favorite cake, or cookie, or pastry that just says to you “This is family, and winter, and hearth, and home”?

For me, it’s  my mom’s gingerbread. Not cookies, but thick brownie-sized chunks of sweet and nutty gingerbread straight from the oven and topped with a melting dollop of lemon curd.

Related articles

• Home-baked gifts add personal touch (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 7 Savory Holiday Food Gifts (wisebread.com)
• Jamie Schler: Decadent Chocolate Spice Cake for the Holidays (huffingtonpost.com)

No blog today, because I hurt my hand and it is painful to type. Instead, you get to watch the following adorableness, and a reminder not to forget the little fuzzy beasties while you’re giving out charitable donations this Christmas. They need our help too.

Simon’s Cat – Snow Days