aamcnamara

Today I baked apple crisp. I also went to Holly Black's event for her new novel (which has vampires), and I cooked carrots and black beans (with honey) for dinner, all orange and black in the frying pan.

I think it might be autumn.

I've written a bunch of letters lately and sent them off. Hopefully, people will write back! I am going to write to more people, too--I would like to have a big group of correspondents, but ideally spread out so that I'm not writing all of the letters at the same time.

It's been a good couple of weeks for reading, too, what with the part where I have a commute now. I've been rereading a lot of Dorothy Sayers lately, and my roommates and I finally finished (re-)watching Season 5 of Buffy. I got Starglass, too--which is by my VP XV classmate Phoebe North, and really an interesting contribution to the generation ship genre. I am definitely intrigued to see what the next book is like!

I also got Caitlin Kiernan's Blood Oranges out of the library, which with Coldest Girl in Coldtown makes an interesting point-counterpoint. Blood Oranges is the gritty horrible side of paranormal novels, along the lines of Sunshine except even less romanticized and (if possible) with even more gross visceral stuff. Coldest Girl is much more in the romanticized vein (ha), even though there is--as Holly Black noted today--a lot of blood in it. Though perhaps not in the romanticized vein so much as examining the romanticization?

Anyway, an interesting pair of novels to read together.

I haven't been writing much, despite good intentions. My brain hasn't been producing many new exciting ideas recently. But at the Holly Black event today I started thinking again about The Urban Fantasy Novel (which I wrote a first draft of lo these many years ago), and how maybe now that I have actually been in college, and through college, and have some small modicum of outside-of-college living on one's own--and tangentially have learned some things about plot and so on--I could attack it and actually rewrite it to be decent. Maybe. Possibly. Though it really would need a lot of work... but I am itching to start doing something, working on something, so why not try this? It may not catch, but then I guess I can just go on to a different defunct project, and yet another, until my brain gets bored enough to generate fresh concepts.

Things that my life will be lacking when I leave London:

1. The sharp-sweet taste of very lemony lemon cookies.
2. A bar of soap that smells of lavender.
3. The taste and mouth-feel of oatcakes spread with jam from Wales (blueberry-apple, I think).
4. Rosemary-scented handsoap in public restrooms (the National Archives, and I think the British Museum as well, though I did not today become a person who smells their hands in the bathroom while washing them).
5. Strawberry toothpaste, which I used to use as a kid but hadn't for years (I have become a mint-toothpaste person) until I ran across it in a store and it was the only flavor they had of Tom's of Maine. Which, well, I have never looked very deeply into the matter of toothpaste, but I needed toothpaste past the tiny travel tube I brought, and I knew that buying Tom's of Maine would make my mother happy. (Hi, Mom.) Hence strawberry, which will now have layered memories of childhood and London in it, if I ever buy it afterward.

Yesterday I finished everything I could do in the National Archives early, so I wandered around in Kew. I found a really nice little used-books shop, where I will endeavor not to spend all of my money (they have dragon sculptures, and shelves that look like trees!), and an organic-food store where I found--glory of glories--EnerG bread, aka the first loaf of bread I have found in England that I can eat. And the aforementioned very lemony lemon cookies, which similarly are the first cookies I have found in England that I can eat. Sandwiches! Toast! Cookies!

Today I went to the British Museum. It is overwhelming and impressive and full of amazing things. I saw several Greek vases that we talked about in my art history class last year! And of course the Elgin Marbles, which were mentioned in novels I read as a kid and imagined as spheres made of marble.

It also wore me down, little by little, by the crowds and the hugeness and the fact that I know that a lot of what's there--all the cultural diversity, and the variety, and the vast timespan covered--was stolen from graves, taken without permission, cheated out of people, etc. Which just kind of came to a head when I got to the Egyptian gallery, already footsore, and realized that they had actual mummies in the cases; and then went into the next room, where there was an example of a basketweave coffin with what appeared to be an actual skeleton in it. Just--people. Is this actually acceptable?

So I left, resisting the urge of "but I haven't seen everything yet!". The Roman fighting demonstrations that I'd stumbled on earlier were still happening, so I sat there for a little while, but then I decided to walk down to the Sir John Soane Museum, which sounded cool. And then I went slightly the wrong way and ended up in Covent Garden instead. Um. Whoops? I found the Apple store (and went up two flights of stairs, having missed the iPods completely on the ground floor--my iPod touch was lost on my journey here, alas, so I wanted to look at what's out there) and I found another tea store (where I did not buy anything, thank you very much, even though they had teapot-shaped tea infusers (I am holding out for the robot-shaped tea infuser I spotted once at the Wedge Co-Op in Minneapolis))... and then I checked my map and saw where I'd gone wrong and headed toward the Soane museum again.

It took a bit more wandering to actually get there, but when I did, I found that it was next to a very nice park (Lincoln's Inn Fields, I believe) in which I sat and ate one of the aforementioned cookies, which I had brought along.

Sir John Soane's idea of museum-collecting, as it turns out, is basically like Isabella Gardner's. Only he was into the Classics, and also peculiar architecture and interesting things to do with natural light, so it's this Victorian-I-think row-house-type-thing crammed with paintings and statues and vases and reliefs where all the light comes from odd skylights (one small room has a tiny glass cupola in its ceiling) and windows with various colors of glass, and gets reflected in the many mirrors and mirrored doors... Said windows usually look out into tiny courtyards filled with further monuments, of course. There's a sarcophagus for a mummy, but it's empty; and the sense of overwhelming personality and Cool Architectural Stuff at least gives something to put in the other pan against the "wow, all this stuff was robbed from graves" thing.

I've no idea what they do when it's overcast--I am not kidding when I say that all the light comes from skylights and windows--although one of my flatmates says they occasionally do a Candlelit Night where they put candles everywhere, which sounds gorgeous.

In the end, I could probably go back to either of the museums I visited today. But I'm more likely to drag people to the Soane, and also I hear there's a false wall I didn't get to see in operation (!). Going back to the British Museum, I think I would have to have a Plan: do initial research on some area/time period/etc. and then go and look at all the things in that or those room(s), so that I at least have some context.

But the British Museum did have a volunteer who let me hold a small Romano-Celtic war-god. So there's that. And really it was a very nice day, although my calves are extremely sore now, and I did not go out again and buy groceries this evening at all. (I should have. If I had made plans for tomorrow at all, not having bought groceries today would mess them right up. But I haven't made plans for tomorrow; and it was windy tonight; and my feet hurt. So there.)

Today I made these cookies (substitute potato starch for the eggs and gluten-free flour plus a bit of xanthan gum for the flour, use brown sugar not white, what is this "chocolate chips and pecans" thing doing in my cookies?). Except with squash, not pumpkin.

Still not quite like the pumpkin/squash cookies my dad makes, but they're closer than the last ones I tried. They'll do.

Mmm, cookies.

Meanwhile, too many things. The sharp wish for a return to Thanksgiving break. Lots of meetings scheduled this week, too, which adds stuff to my already kind of packed schedule. (Up this week: history paper, physics test.)

Earlier this evening my theater-history textbook was telling me about Cardinal Richelieu's role in consolidating French theater, and all I could think of was Dumas. This is how you can tell I'm a geek, ladies and gentlemen and others! Still--interesting to get even that glimpse of him from outside the world of D'Artagnan. Between this and my Renaissance Italy class and my classics art history course, I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of western history. Which was something I really wanted to get in college, after mainly being taught American history three times over in high school.

Still noodling on the difficult scene in A Returning Power. I think I might have to restructure this whole bit, scene-wise, so it works with what I have to do now. Alack and all that.

What else? Vaguely disconnected, floaty. Not ready for finals. I want winter break, but I don't want the semester to be over. The end of it is racing toward us, though. Next semester will be good but very different and in the middle of it there's J-term, where I will be at home and hopefully doing stuff but I've started kind of wishing I could be here.

So, in essence, as are we all: full of contradictory impulses. And squash cookies. (Nom.)

In excitement of physics-research-stuff yesterday, missed email telling me that my carpool-to-choir's car had broken down and we had to take the bus. Result: me sitting around for half an hour waiting, finally calling and--ah. Should have been on the bus forty-five minutes ago. At which point, not much I could have done to get there.

Instead of usefully spending my evening writing my essay for next week, I decided that the better way to use it would be baking. So we now have vanilla cupcakes, and I am a much calmer and happier Alena than I was earlier.

There is something about taking three random vanilla cupcake recipes from the Internet and the entire contents of your room's baking supplies down to the kitchen to improvise your own slapdash combination of them all that's very comforting to me. And I've been doing this long enough (read: my whole life) that I can do this and it works. With everything else the way it always is--messy--it's nice to do something that doesn't take so very long, that you know how to do, that works. Especially something like that which also means that at the end you have tasty baked goods sitting on your tea-table waiting to be eaten.

( vague reconstruction of recipe )

In food-related news, project Avoid Dining Halls Over Fall Break progresses nicely. For lunch I had the leftovers of the rice-and-vegetables from last night, some potato chips I'd picked up in my wanders, and an apple previously scrumped from the dining hall plus sunflower butter.

When it came to dinnertime I was a little more ambitious: I'd gotten some frozen ground-turkey patties in Northampton and cooked them up last night to refrigerate. Today I broke them into pieces and put them in the rice-cooker along with a can of beans and a can of tomatoes, and cooked the result. Then I dumped all that into a plastic thing, stuck it in the fridge, and put some rice in the rice-cooker--with spinach (local! organic!) in the steamer-pan. Result: deliciousness. Thought I had made too much rice, until I started eating. Nom.

Best part: I have two days' worth of leftovers, and will only have to do rice and vegetables tomorrow and the next day in order to have just as much tasty food. I think we call that a win. Even if I had to wash All The Things afterward.

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Today I invented time travel. Perks of being a speculative-fiction writer. Though admittedly it's a fantasy novel and the time travel is done with magic, which isn't how most people who write time travel mean that sentence. (Query: fantasy novels with time travel? They must exist, but I can't think of any.)

My Big Goal had been, as you know Dear Reader, a complete re-draft of this by the end of the month. That... may not happen. But progress feels good: I am hitting my forehead against new snags!

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Have His Carcase, Sayers: Well, that was rather silly. But I liked it--though not as much as Strong Poison or Gaudy Night. Benefit is that now I get to reread Gaudy Night before I go on to Busman's Honeymoon.

"J.J." (Criminal Minds episode): That was good.

The Urban Fantasy Novel, first draft in-progress:



The ridiculous revision dash (by wordcount in thousands), novel I wrote last summer:



Other tasks accomplished: made blueberry-strawberry pancakes, baked raspberry muffins, slushed for Ideomancer, read part of Jo Walton's The King's Peace. (Can you tell that one of the things I enjoy most about summer is berries?)

We could call that a day.

What I just had for lunch:
- leftovers of black bean/sweet potato/carrot/kale stirfry from last night
- the end of a (vegan, gluten-free) apple muffin from The Wedge
- some strawberries which I was virtuous in eating because soon they will go bad

Now I'm contemplating a piece of the raisin bread with brown sugar encrusted on the top that my dad made in the breadmaker a few days ago. Which I would put in the toaster oven to make the brown sugar go all melty and delicious.

Also plausible is rice ice-cream substitute with rhubarb sauce on it. Most of the time I am not a huge fan of rice ice-cream substitutes (Oatscreme was fabulous and is now pretty much dead, alas), but rhubarb is excellent.

This post tagged "allergies" because sometimes I forget that I can eat plenty of delicious things anyway.

After due further experimentation:

How to make cake in a mug in a microwave, without gluten, dairy, egg, or soy. (Or many other things.)

( ingredients, process, etc. )

Every time I make one of these it is better than the last. Just think, by the time I graduate I will be making fabulous Cake Inna Mug in the microwave!

The last part of my winter break was wholly unproductive--I alternated sitting around reading books and hanging out with friends. Only being back for two weeks means that I definitely failed at seeing everyone, but I got to see quite a few people, which was good. Hit most of my Twin Cities highlights, too: Como Park Conservatory, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, three or four different libraries...

Kinds of cookies devoured: 4 (sugar cookie cut-outs, pumpkin with cranberries, molasses, oatmeal-raisin)
Kinds of bread devoured: 2 (Stollen, cornbread)
Candy canes devoured: 12?
Books read: a bunch
Tiny oranges devoured: too many to count

Soon I will be headed back to campus for J-term. My writing goals for the next few weeks include:
- write some more solstice stories
- keep working on the first draft of The Urban Fantasy Novel
- print out "As Large As Alone" and go over the beginning with a fine-toothed comb
- for my J-term class (GLBT content in children's and YA lit), write a final project--possibly the first chapter of a YA GLBT novel.

Other activities will include Having fun and Working at my awesome job.

So the non-main point of this post is that I'm 18 now, and can thus--um-- vote? And smoke, if I wanted to (I have asthma. I don't.), or sign forms for myself without my parents signing for me. Signing forms vicariously is not really a birthday sort of activity, though. (Okay, I have figured out a legitimately awesome thing about turning 18--I can now view LJ posts marked as possibly containing explicit content! Rock.)

The main point of this post is that I decided to make myself a cake.

What kind of cake, you ask?

An ice cream cake.

And here's where I out myself as having lots and lots of food allergies, because it was not just any ice cream cake, it had to be a gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free ice cream cake. Oh, and because I don't do anything by halves, I decided that it would be homemade ice cream substitute.

Since this is a nonlinear narrative, here's a picture of the finished cake:


( Long post is long. Also, has pictures. ) I am calling this one a win.

More photos here.