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Cindy Lue GrueIt is dark. March 27 The horror, the horrorI will preface this entry by saying that I am a cat owner. This is important, because in this capacity I have long since become inured to most anything that ordinary people would deem nasty or gross. Once you have cleared away the partially decomposed corpses of small, furry woodland creatures... once you have stepped in a still-warm pile of vomit at 3AM... once you have tended the gaping, festering abcess in your little buddy's belly that resulted from his epic fight with the mother raccoon... well, you just develop a higher tolerance to things that make most people go "ick". It goes with the territory.
I mention this only to give some perspective to the following comment: I just finished cleaning our main-floor shower after a month of trying to unclog the drains with enzymatic powder, and it was absolutely, horrifically disgusting. From the chunky black mildew in every grout line to the garlands of stringy, eerily transluscent mold dripping down across the tiles, the clean-up job was half an hour of sheer, unadultered repugnance. I am going to be twitching for the next two days, every time I think about it. Gahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
I think I need a hug. December 10 Bad WolfAny Doctor Who fans out there? I sure hope so, because otherwise nobody's going to understand why I'm soooooo happy with our new vanity license plate...
Total geek? Me? Why yes, thank you. Yes, I am. ^_^ November 07 "What the heck... she's alive?"Okay, so I'm a blog slacker. You knew that. Every time I try to pretend that I can keep a regular schedule of maintaining this thing, I end up waist-deep in FAIL.
Every once in a while, though, I get the urge to reassure people that I'm not actually dead. So here we go:
I'm not actually dead.
I am partway through a year-long sabbatical, and working on my first fantasy novel. I have no clue whether it will ever be published, nor does it matter: I'm writing it for myself and for my hubby, who loves epic fantasy. I'm still doing a bit of freelance writing for Microsoft, but by and large, I'm concentrating on my own work for the moment. I really like the way the story is coming along.
Now if only it was going a little faster... February 18 Lost (Art of Great RPG Design) OdysseyFinally! I've been waiting for this for so long, I started to think it was never going to happen again: the Japanese RPG market has spawned something really, really good! Hubby and I started playing Lost Odyssey a few days ago, and... wow. So many types of wow. This game is single-handedly (and quad-diskedly) restoring my faith in Japanese RPGs. Of course, the game is beautiful; these days, that's practically a given. But even then, Lost Odyssey stands out with rich environments, amazing cutscene cinematography, incredibly unique cityscapes, and the sort of costume design that makes me wish I was twenty years younger and good at metalwork. Honestly, though, the game doesn't even need to be as visually magnificent as it is. I was already happy with just two things: the landscapes aren't made up of various shades of brown, and the main characters don't look as though they use 50 collective gallons of hairspray before leaving the inn every morning. Besides, where this game really shines is in design and story; the gameplay evolution is right up there with the odd-numbered Final Fantasy games, and the plot is not merely passable but compelling. I'll rave and ramble more about the design and story when I have time to do the topic justice; for now, let's just say... um... wow. And for extra fangirlish glee, the game even includes the original Japanese language track, which is chock-full of superb voice acting. Not to jinx anything -- we're only ten hours into the game -- but so far, Lost Odyssey is doing absolutely everything right. Some day, we'll get around to finishing Wild Arms 4. And Digital Devil Saga II. And Tales of the Abyss. And five or six other JRPGs that we've started but didn't have the burning urge to complete. That's just the sort of players we are. But for now, we're going to thoroughly enjoy the breath of fresh air called Lost Odyssey, and hope like crazy that the game bucks one more appalling trend and actually provides a really satisfying ending. Hope hope hope! Diet update for week four Diet update for week five BONUS: piccies! Here's my lovely raven tattoo... ...and here's Bren's adorable chocobo tattoo! Once I've finished losing weight, I'm planning to have some background detail added to my raven, hopefully building it into a full backpiece with swirly clouds and gorgeous landscape and plants and flowers, oh my! I have an appointment this Wednesday with George from Laughing Buddha; we'll plan out what it's going to look like and how much I need to lose before we can get started! February 04 A little slice of hellWell, this sucks. I had an entire blog entry written, I hit the little button to add a photo, I got a pop-up thingie for installation, and WHAM, all my text went away. Half an hour's work, reduced once more to its component electrons. Now I get to sit here and try to remember everything I typed, including an entire recipe. Frankly, this is so high on the list of Monumentally Irritating Crap that many of today's other annoyances seem paltry by comparison. And no, that is not a good thing. >_<
Most of what I was griping about here was Wild Arms 4, and how it continues to disappoint. As I mentioned before, this otherwise RPG-style game has a jarring, obnoxious tendancy to descend into platformer action. And the more we play, the more obvious it becomes that the platformer sections are poorly designed. The game's camera is fixed, which frequently makes it impossible to judge distances: a bit annoying in RPG exploration, but a massive frustration factor in a platformer, particularly since the distances in question involve ledges, pipes, and spinny laser beams of doom. There's nothing like playing the same hallway ten times because you can't tell whether any given dark spot is a shadow on the floor or a yawning pit of certain death. Thank you, game. Thank you for giving me an excuse to indulge in some primal scream therapy. Thank you for breaking up all the chatty, predictable cutscenes with cathartic moments of overwhelming fury. Thank you for removing all emotional attachment I might have otherwise developed for these characters by making me want to slam their heads repeatedly into the ceiling or throw them to their deaths. You rock.
In other news, hubby and I have a habit of missing out on any given trend in popular media until the rest of the world is long since tired of it -- hence, our "discovery" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer two years after it was off the air -- and we are now cheerfully feeding this habit with a subscription to Netflix. Movies we missed, anime we didn't bother to download, TV series that sounded vaguely good at the time but we never got around to watching: Netflix is paradise for the second-run theater crowd. Our first happy Netflix find was the Film Crew movies. Seeing the MST3K boys back in action, together again, was practically a dream come true. I say "practically", of course, because my own dreams rarely involve grindingly bad B-movies. But we're so very happy to indulge in more good bad cinema with our favorite commentators!
We've also started watching Eureka, as if you needed any more proof that we're a couple of geeks. We saw the pilot for this show when it first aired, and thought it looked like fun, but we're monumentally bad at catching anything when it airs on TV. Now that we can sit down to an episode whenever we like, we're both really enjoying the show. Okay, yes, the characters are mostly one-dimensional or stereotyped. But the dialogue is witty, and you just can't beat pseudoscience for amusing plot fodder. We look forward to seeing more!
Diet update for week three
Because it's easier to stick to a weight loss plan if you humiliate yourself online by posting stats.
Miles walked: 4 (getting better)
Pounds lost: 1
Total pounds lost so far: 6
Pounds to go: 102
Nastiest thing consumed last week in the name of "healthy eating": baked spaetzle. I had this crazy thought that I could oven-bake spaetzle until crunchy, instead of frying it in a whole stick of butter like I usually do, and it would still be tasty with chicken and gravy. FAIL.
BONUS! Diet-y recipe:
Magnificent 350-Calorie Meatball Sammiches
The cornerstone of my theory on successful dieting is that you should never eat anything you don't like. Most actual "diet food" is so nasty that eating it for an extended period of time constitutes a form of self-inflicted psychological torture: after a month or two, only the hardiest of souls (or those without taste buds) can avoid a breakdown and resultant diet-ditching. Hence my experimentation into lower-calorie and portion-controlled versions of meals that I really, really like. And this week's resounding success is the meatball sammich.
3 pounds uber-lean ground beef (4% fat, such as Laura's Leanest)
4 eggs
2 slices white bread
1 big-ass sweet onion (or 2 smaller ones)
1.5 TBSP basil
1.5 TBSP oregano
1.5 TBSP parsley
1.25 TSP garlic powder
2 TSP salt
dash pepper
hot dog buns
ketchup
Early in the day, toast two slices of white bread and set them aside; they should be nice and stale for the evening's meatball-making frenzy.
When you're ready to start cooking, crack the eggs into a large mixing bowl and beat until well-blended. Finely dice the onion and add it to the bowl. Place the stale toast slices into a plastic bag and crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin, then add the crumbs to the mixing bowl. Add the spices and stir everything well. Now add the ground beef, roll up your sleeves, and start mixing!
Once the beef and other ingredients are thoroughly inseperable, divide the mixture into three lumps. Then divide each of those three into three smaller lumps. Each of the nine resultant meaty blobs can be further divided into eight meatballs. Roll the meatballs between your palms to get the right shape, then place them into two large rectangular glass baking dishes (36 meatballs per dish).
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees, then place both dishes on the lower center rack and bake for 20 minutes. Once the meatballs cool, you can portion them out: place six meatballs each into 12 plastic baggies and freeze them for the future. Then, whenever you have a jones for beef, you can thaw out a set, reheat them in the microwave, drop 'em onto a 100-calorie hot dog bun, slather 'em in Heinz ketchup (another 50 calories), and voila! A 350-calorie meatball sammich from heaven.
If your diet permits a bit more excess, you can substitute leanest ground beef (7% fat) in the meatballs, and your sammich will still be a mere 400 calories. Yum! |
What's eating my life this week?
My very first obsession, and still a fave.
What we watch while eating dinner
My favorite places on the Net
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