(no subject)

[dragonlady7]

Today my major accomplishment has been that I managed to make split-pea soup.
My recipe:
Buy a pair of smoked ham hocks and throw them in the freezer.
Buy a bag of Goya split peas and keep them in the closet.
On a cold hungry morning, throw the ham hocks into a pot without bothering to defrost them, then root around for the bag of split peas. Follow the recipe on the back of the bag: Six cups water, one bag split peas, one diced onion, one sliced carrot, one cube chicken stock powder, one clove garlic, minced, omit the weird ham they ask for, dump all that into a pot, and cook "until peas are tender", which is about an hour or two.
Then because I am clever I let it cool before I removed the ham hocks and dissected them. There's very little meat in them, but what there is is flavorful. Z always pulls the hocks out of the hot pot and burns his fingers trying to cut them up.

So all I have to do is reheat that and make some corn bread. The corn bread will be extravagantly tasty because I have saved up some bacon fat for the shortening.
Nobody's ever said I can't cook, I just sort of, well, often, well, don't.

I also made several icons out of my favorite bits of the Ile-Rien trilogy. I seldom make icons, so I am inordinately proud of these, even if none of them is perfect. If anyone wants to use any of these, let me know. I can make more too. ;)

	The Ships of Air. I can't find the page now (smart of me to write it down, right?) but the quote is, approximately, "We never bargain with wizards," Ilias said somewhat primly. "It's a good way to get your insides boiled."
	The Wizard Hunters, p. 38. Yes, I'm a bloody heroine, Tremaine thought, stepping past them. It made her wonder how many of history's favorite heroines were just incompetent suicides.
	The Gate of Gods, p. 17. Nicholas stopped to regard him directly, the stream of people impatiently circling around them. Ilias still couldn't see his eyes but his voice was dry and faintly exasperated. "That aside, if anything happened to you, Tremaine would of course assume I had arranged it. No evidence I could produce of my innocence, no alibi no matter how ironclad, would convince her otherwise, and I could shorly expect an unpleasant surprise." Turning away to continue up the street, he added, "If you raise a daughter to be both independent and an excellent marksman, you have to accept the fact that your control over her actions is at an end."
	The Gate of Gods, p. 23 Smiling, Ander said, "You look lovely. That outfit suits you." Tremaine regarded him blankly. She distrusted compliments on her appearance in principle, but she really couldn't find anything in that statement to object to. It made an interesting contrast to what Ilias had said when she had gotten dressed this morning, which had been, "Why do you wear clothes that hide your breasts? It's not as if anyone's going to think you don't have any." Come to think of it, she hadn't been able to muster a suitable reply to that one either.
	The Gate of Gods, p.272. The creature huddled on the walkway for a startled moment, believing itself inexplicably trapped by metal walls, giving the officer a chance to throw a canvas bag over it and the sailor to leap forward and pound it with a wrench. Prior experience had taught them to wait until green fluid actually leaked out through the canvas. The officer found a prybar and poked he bag over, until they could see that the thing's head had been smashed. Then he gathered it up with a sigh. "Join the Rienish navy," the woman sailor remarked, watching this process with distaste. "See unusual sights. Never sleep with the lights out again."
	The Gate of Gods, p. 25. Tremaine thought of trying to explain Nicholas's taste in houses, or Nicholas's taste in general, and decided against it. She also thought of saying I shot a man in cold blood to get a truck, Ander, so please get that tone that says "you silly little girl" out of your voice when you speak to me. "Nothing," she muttered. Nothing changes. You shouldn't have let him come.

Well that gave my Photoshopping, Google-Image-searching, and HTML table-making skills a whirl. Who here remembers when I was a webdesigner? I don't! It's like it happened to someone else. But the site I made for that stupid company is still online and still doing just fine in web searches. Sigh.

I have had a headache all day. I took a nap this afternoon, caving in to necessity, and when I woke, for a blissful couple of minutes, I thought it had done the trick. I feel all better, I thought happily. Then I sat up, and said, "Ow," and realized that I still have a headache and a sinus ache and a congested throat and a distant feeling of medicine-head despite not having taken any medicine besides a couple vitamins.
So...
Bah.

I have finished the sole bit of Ile-Rien fanfic I was allowing myself-- a filthy plot-what-plot about Tremaine, Ilias, and some chocolate-- but I will be saving that to post at some future date. It is far, far too long, but it was the perfect indulgent thing to let myself write to remind myself that this is supposed to be fun. Also there's just an insane amount of sex in it, which hopefully has gotten that out of my system so that my NaNo novel won't just be a porn-fest. Given that I'm halfway contemplating making the female lead an Internet porn star (did I mention that the porn blogger got back to me about my questions about the porn business? Yes indeed), I probably really needed to clean out those pipes to give myself a decent shot at something mainstream-publishable.

Now I have to find a place for Ile-Rien fanfic. Are there any communities out there for that kind of thing?