#sevenblackandwhitephotos challenge Day 1, Seven black and white...

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#sevenblackandwhitephotos challenge Day 1, Seven black and white photos, no humans, no explanation.
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welp it’s 4:45 amsittin’ outside my

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welp it’s 4:45 am

sittin’ outside my mother-out-law’s house with the car running

dark, no lights on inside

my dude said she’s got to get to the airport this morning to fly out to california, tuesday, yes today. there’s no sign of her.

i am not the most socially confident person. i am not going to bang on her door. there is no sign of life. she’s the world’s most organized person. the odds of her sleeping through her alarm are approximately zilch. she’s not the most prompt human being ever to have lived, but she also has never been late when it matters. (I don’t think she was late to work one time in her career.)

I call dude. “Did she absolutely confirm today with you?” I ask. Meanwhile I look at my phone calendar. I entered the date in as she said it to me, months ago, at a dinner. I recall it being a weekday– it’s always a weekday when she flies– but my calendar says Sunday. “Did you talk to her yesterday?”

“No,” Dude admits. “Last week, she told me Tuesday.”

“It’s Tuesday,” I say, and look at that dark house. I’ve been sitting here like ten minutes in her driveway like a creeper.

I don’t want to bang on her door. She sleeps upstairs. If she’s asleep she won’t hear me. When the police came to tell her her husband was dead they banged on the door and she only woke because the dog came to get her instead of barking at them. But that dog is long gone, that was fifteen years ago. but it’s all I can think of and I’m not going to bang on that door.

I don’t even know if I’d bang on the door if it was my mother. I do not have that kind of social confidence. I wish he’d texted her yesterday to confirm, or told me he hadn’t spoken to her directly so I could. I texted her when I got here; I could see from down the street that no lights were on. But she hasn’t replied. I know she’s often up this early anyway, there’s literally no way she would sleep through her alarm. Ugh, I hate how Dude literally never calls his mother and never talks to her either. I text my mom pretty frequently and would definitely have confirmed this with her like eight times, but I let him be the go-between on most communication with his mother because I think he should talk to her more. See where that gets me.

Well, I’m going back home, I’m not going to sit here. I’ll feel like a heel if she really did sleep through her alarm, but I’m not going to bang on her door and cause a ruckus.

It sucks, though, because I won’t get back to sleep in time before my alarm, and I didn’t go to bed early last night because I’d forgotten about this.

Bummer.
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sigh. mother-not-law texted

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sigh. mother-not-law texted back. “tomorrow,” she says. “it’s tomorrow. i’m going tomorrow. i told him i would call to confirm the night before. which is tonight.”

that’s what I get for assuming my dude has ever in his life talked to a human being without being forced to. you’d think i’d know by now. 

relatedly the cat will not shut up and i have resorted to force-snuggling her. she pretends she’s upset by this, lies there like a log, but she purrs like a crazy thing the whole time.
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hey i have an extra hour still left of being awake before work maybe i should put on a full face of.

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hey i have an extra hour still left of being awake before work maybe i should put on a full face of makeup just to practice. why the fuck not? 
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girl why u insist on putting lipgloss on over lipstick it always turns out so gd sticky ughalso gurl

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girl why u insist on putting lipgloss on over lipstick it always turns out so gd sticky ugh

also gurl u never brush yr hair how is makeup gonna make that better spoiler: it’s not

if i was going to learn how to do makeup i would have already but it’s just so tempting to keep buying it because it looks like candy and who doesn’t want to put prettiness onto themselves? it doesn’t make me prettier though, i look like i look, which is a fine way for a human to look, also the single most expensive thing in that photograph up there is the teeth in my lower jaw which basically no human has ever seen boy did that orthodontist sell my parents a bill of goods but LOOK HOW STRAIGHT THEY ARE yes that’s right, my lower teeth, my upper teeth were just fine and not even a charlatan could sell my parents on braces for those. ugh it’s been 22 years since those braces came off and i haven’t really forgiven or forgotten.

dang tho my cheekbones are hella freckled even with foundation on wtf those aren’t even freckles i bet those are age spots. what’s the difference i honestly don’t know. i am extremely aware that the price of never having had any pigment in my skin my whole life is that it’s going to randomly assemble into big ol liver spots before i’ve even menopaused. whatever.

shit bro this lipstick is never going to set up i need to get it off before i get it all over everything i love
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For the writer meme: there's a phrase you use every once in a while about someone moaning or groanin

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Haha, thanks. I actually noticed that one pretty recently and was like, do I overuse that? but as I dithered about how else to convey that detail, I was like, look, the word gratifying exists for a reason and that’s basically the reason, so. 

I’m glad someone else who noticed it also considered it apt. 

Sometimes I think my romance scenes get formulaic, but then I look around at the genre and think, you know, sometimes formulas exist for a reason.

I have a lot of characters whose characterization includes getting off on getting someone they care about off, I think that’s a reasonable niche. 
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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post: ...

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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post: sigh. mother-not-law texted back. “tomorrow,” she…

Sounds like it’s Dude’s turn to perform the pickup.

y’know? you’d think.

but i don’t fall back asleep easily after waking, most times. and when he does this, he not only wakes up, bangs around getting ready, slams the car door like a zillion times, etc., but he also comes home afterward and bangs around and gets back into bed, and i wind up lying awake the whole time between and usually have just dozed off when he gets back home, and then he bangs around getting un-ready before getting back into bed for like, twenty minutes, and i usually get up ten minutes before he does anyway, and so like

nobody gets any sleep, least of all me

when I do it, well, I work out by the airport, so I just– stay out in that neighborhood, get a coffee, go into work super early and get a bunch of stuff done. then dude’s sleep’s not disrupted (if he doesn’t get 10 hours of sleep a day he’s fucking useless. this is why i decided like a decade ago that there won’t be kids. i’ve never regretted that decision.) 

so, i’ll do that tomorrow. i don’t mind, i just– she said she’d arranged with him that she’d call to remind him the night before, and I knew that was a standard thing, and so just assumed she’d done so, and for some reason it didn’t strike him as odd that she hadn’t, and none of us can figure out why.

I know I wrote it down wrong on my calendar, gcal is notoriously difficult for me to use on mobile, i figured i’d write it down wrong and then have to ask which day it was supposed to be. i just. i just.

i don’t know why i assumed that he knew what the fuck he was talking about, because he has literally never called his mother in his life, so. 
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#sevenblackandwhitephotos Post one a day, no humans, no...

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#sevenblackandwhitephotos Post one a day, no humans, no explanations.
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Alexandra Stafford's No-Knead Peasant Bread

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I saw an excellent peasant bread recipe a while back and got all excited to try it, and then I saw this one somewhere too, and I left it open in a tab on my phone for literally months, and then I closed it. But I remembered the name of it because I saw it every time I opened a new Chrome tab on my phone. If you’re the person who posted a link to it, thank you! But I don’t remember why I had it open in a tab.

Anyway, I tried this recipe finally. Here’s the thing: I hate kneading bread. I mean, I like it, but i hate getting stuff on my hands, I had eczema between my fingers for like, a formative decade, so I just don’t get my hands wet much if I can help it, and, anyway. The point of this recipe, and what made it work for me, is that you literally never touch the dough with your hands. Not even to shape the loaves; they bake in bowls.

The version of this recipe on my phone was one of those ones with a blog entry beforehand where she waxes rhapsodic about vintage Pyrex, and goes on and on about which size bowl you gotta use.

I don’t have vintage Pyrex. I have two 1.5-quart Pyrex-ish casserole dishes.

I made this in those. It worked fine. 

And here, the true acid test: I left the recipe scribbled on a piece of paper (I never can cook straight off the phone or computer, I always hand-write recipes) and said offhand to Dude that we could have more of that great bread, and he successfully made this recipe from my abbreviated-to-fuck recipe with no notes. It was a little underdone but that’s not his fault. (Except that he didn’t realize it would take two hours, which ok my handwriting’s bad but if he read the whole recipe or paid attention the whole time I was making it while he was in the room, he’d know that. So he started at like, 6pm. Don’t do that.)

So anyway. Here’s my rec. Casserole dishes work fine if they’re smallish. 

I bet… *whispers* I bet you could do this in a loaf pan. Is that blasphemy? I bet you could. I have loaf pans, I might use them next time.
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laughingacademy: deducecanoe: jack-the-lion: verdeinvolumes: Oh...

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deducecanoe:

jack-the-lion:

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Oh look, they managed to build purgatory. Fantastic.

She can’t believe it. XD

How does this even work? I can’t imagine it in my head.

*INCEPTION NOISE*

I watched this on mute several times and was really amused, and finally unmuted it and it’s… the university my dude went to!!! What! 

So I made him watch it. And he said, oh, building 7 is Art, it’s a super-weird place… and then the chick came up the stairs and he was like no… no, that’s not real. That can’t be real. 

He insists this isn’t real. 

Ah, Snopes confirms, it’s not. But. It was so cool to speculate on how it might be! I would never have questioned it if I’d done my usual never-bother-unmuting-it trick, LOL. 
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