Vikings on public assistance

[dragonlady7]

Last night Z and I finally got off our asses and went grocery shopping. I had sort of been putting it off, because 400,000 local people (including the grocery stores themselves!) had to throw out everything in their fridges last week, so I was kind of figuring pickins would be slim for a bit.
But last night, we ate the last meal we had preparations for, and it was just getting ridiculous. Z was tired, so I let him zonk out for 2 hours while I made frivolous LJ posts and played with Photoshop (good use of time, eh? I thought so), and then we collected the pieces of ourselves and went down to Wegman's for a late-night shopping run.

The place had been pillaged. There were just these aisles of empty shelves. It was like locusts had been through. Fortunately the horde that had come through had apparently different tastes from us, so for the most part we were able to get the things we wanted. But as we reached the Kool-Aid aisle and stared in bafflement at the devastation, an employee heard our discussion.
"Oh," she said, "yes, we're out of a lot of stuff. You see, last night, there was, um," and she paused, trying to think of how to explain it.
"Pirates," Z said helpfully.
"No," the girl said, but laughed. "Vikings, actually."
"Vikings!" I said. "This time of year?"
"The food stamps people got during the storm," she said, "there was a rumor that they were going to expire last night at midnight. So they all came through and stocked up on things."
"Damn," I said. "I thought those Capital One ads were fiction. I didn't realize how many Vikings were actually on public assistance."
The girl shrugged. "I couldn't believe it either," she said. "Of course, the food stamps didn't actually expire, but that didn't keep things from getting crazy in here. I should know, I was here."

So who'd've known? Guess they've really come down in the world. Poor bastards.

When we came home we industriously put everything away, and then continued and managed to clean the kitchen and get all the dishes done. So I'm feeling astonishingly smug at the moment: There is not one dirty dish in the house. Well, there's one: I finally got my bourbon and ginger ale, and I didn't wash that glass yet. It was good, folks. Really good. I recommend it. (The ratio, however, should be almost 1:1.)

In unrelated news, I finished the Ile-Rien fanfic I was writing, and have posted it public at treigylgweith, with an intro so you don't have to have read the books to get what's going on.
It's about 6,000 words, a strong R (heterosexual, relatively vanilla sex, but explicit):
Pairing: Ilias/Tremaine
Fandom: The Fall of Ile-Rien
Title: Leverage
Eventually I'll find a community that wants Ile-Rien fanfic, but at the moment I really have to get a move on and do some other things. Like, you know, get ready for the exercise in oddity that will be this November. I am convinced that I am going to write, from scratch, a discrete and publishable novel that will not contain any tangents or extraneous plot components. The fact that I have not yet outlined this thing yet doesn't deter me. No. I will be smart. I will be canny. I will be disciplined. And somehow this will work.

Well, we'll see.


Oh, more importantly: marthawells has just finished posting the entirety of her out of print first novel, The Element Of Fire, on her Livejournal. So if you were waiting until it was all there to read it, now's the time to start. It is excellent, a good read, and also a very quick read. Her pacing in this one is fabulous, in that it whips right along and never drags but never leaves the reader behind either.
So, here's the link to the page with links to all of it. There are 20 chapters in total.
The Element Of Fire.
Read it.
I'll shut up now.
I promise.