Appppppples (did I mention apples?)

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It’s Apple Season!

so far, we’ve made “crock pot cider” (cook quartered apples until squishy, strain) and “boiled cider” (also known as apple cider syrup: boil down cider until the consistency of maple syrup). We’ve also cooked apple cake, apple coffee cake, and apple pie, apple risotto and apple-butternut soup.

Next on the list are apple sauce, apple chutney, and apple butter, as well as apple cookies, apple-and-sausage savory pies, and apple kale soup.

Anyone have a favorite apple recipe, esp. one that cans or freezes well?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/989509.html. You can comment here or there.

Ideas for Novellas

Sep28

It occurred to me that I could and possibly should try writing a novella (10K words) every second month (because I could work on something longer-form in the off months).

So here is an incomplete list of things I want to write long form stories on:
* A proper intro to Tir na Cali
* Fires of Gobann
* Rock and a Hard Place (see first: Rock, Hard, Now What?)
* Prince Rodegard (first: here)
* The Kaa-tah (here)

Hunh, last time I counted 8.

Oh,
* Space Accountant
* The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper
* Beekeeper
* Pet Story

Edited to add:
* Doomsday Academy

Edited Edited to add:
SubVerse

Qualifications:
something I’m starting from a relatively short piece. That leaves out The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper, Beekeeper, makes Rock and a Hard Place & Space Accountant questionable.

Something I know I can have fun writing.
That leaves out Doomsday & makes Space Accountant & Kaa-Tah Questionable.

Easy/no worldbuilding?
Makes Prince Rodgeard & Subverse questionable.

Something with easy plotting?
Tir na Cali & Fires of Gobann.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/986928.html. You can comment here or there.

Productivity Today!

Sep27

Today, so far, I/we (T & I) have:

* Pulled the chest freezer out from the garage, thawed it, and cleaned up the exploded apple goo from the bottom (Cider jugs have a variable amount of headspace. Sometimes it’s not enough.)

* Run a batch of tiny apples from the Spare Trees through the squeezo set up on the mixer (T. chopped ’em and put ’em to boil a couple days ago)

* Boiled down the last of the pico de gallo from the company picnic into a passable tomato sauce & froze that

* Picked more tiny apples

(* took a nap)

(* Had a very tasty fried egg & jowl bacon w/ pico de gallo & chives for breakfast and very nice not-at-all-traditional latkes w/ more chives and sour cream for lunch)

* cut new supports for the mailbox front out of plastic wood

* Made a sour cream apple coffee cake (it’s currently in the oven) (this recipe) with sour cream from the company picnic

(The company picnic was catered by Moe’s. Next up are fried cinnamon-and-sugar tortilla chips…)

* Wrote an Aunt Family Piece for kelkyag/Patreon & created a Canva picture for it, though it’s not my favorite design.

Next up:

* Pick more apples, take a walk, write the last kitty Patreon piece for the month, do some Day Job, maybe do some Edally & This Other Project Thing writing. Have dinner, hang out with husband, pet cats.

* Clean up the kitchen, put the freezer back in the barn

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/986804.html. You can comment here or there.

Slump!

Sep18

I’m not entirely certain what happened – work stress, life stress, home improvement, summer, probably some combination – but I have been in a bit of a writing slump lately.

I am slowly clawing my way out of it, but I wanted to let everyone know that, indeed, I do still exist as more than a WordPress autoposter. <.<

I feel like doing character studies this week/end, 50-150 words of a given character in a plausible situation.

So:

Give me an extant character in any of my settings (or fanfic I’ve written) (if obscure, give me a link) and a plausible situation, something that ~could~ be canon.

I will write 50-150 words of said character in said situation.

See “character” under my tags for an entirely incomplete list. See Character Lists for characters from Aunt Family, Science! and Planners, as well as a partial list of “Named Male Characters with active personalities/speaking lines.”

Thank you for your aid in beating this slump!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/982240.html. You can comment here or there.

New Project in Queue: Ten Dollar ($15.51) Ledges

Aug15

I’m redoing my cave, I might have mentioned.

And in doing so, I wanted to do something with the pile of very small (art-card size and up) flat art I’ve accumulated over the years.

I finally decided on picture ledges after a bit of googling, and, having done that, said to myself, “Hey, doesn’t Ana White have a pattern for that?”

Ana White has a pattern for everything. She’s this DIY guru who puts together easy-to-understand patterns for furniture. Much of what she does is knockoffs of high-end catalog stuff.

And she happens to have a Ten-Dollar Ledge plan!

So I’m gonna make three 32″ ledges!

My lumber cost me $15.51 after discount and tax, so I guess there’s been a bit of inflation. But still! Compared to the price of a single shelf anywhere…!

Now, of course, I’m gonna have more shelf than I have small art – so, where can I buy art* that fit in frames 6×8″ or smaller?

* Like, from independent crowdfunded artists, not posters.com or such.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/972716.html. You can comment here or there.

Cave Renovations

Aug9

There is a room in our house off the living room that we call the cave.

It’s approx. 8’x8’x6.6′, off a room that is 14-ish feet wide, and it hides behind the wood stove, so in the winter it’s super warm. My desk is in there, and the armchair where I do the rest of my writing.

But it was painted white-over-yellow-over green with awful wallpaper, the walls were a mess, and there was a door leading into the wall, about 1.5’x2′ in size, that just looked ugly (It was, before they sided the house, a door for throwing firewood in). There’s also awful awful awful linoleum, but since we’re going to later drop the floor down to be level with the rest of the living room, we might not fix that just now.

Mom came to visit yesterday, and over the course of approx. 11-4, we replaced the door to nowhere with drywall, removed the wallpaper border, Mom washed… everything (she does that) and we got the first coat of spackle/joint compound on most of the places that needed it.

It already is starting to look better!

Today… more joint compound. And then… more spackle, and the first stages of sanding.

Within 2 weeks… paint! A nice coat of the house color (just-barely-off-white) over everything.

And new switch plates. Lots of new – well, 4, 4 new wall plates.

Hooray!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/967993.html. You can comment here or there.

July Wordcount and Project goals

Aug3

I almost got to my 25000-word goal this month! I was just a few words shy, so I’ll count that as a win.

However, in re. projects, I had a bit less luck keeping things even. I got a lot of not-planned stuff done (see that “all other” bar) but not so much on stuff I wanted to do.

Let’s see how August goes!

edit: updated with corrected chart <.<

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/966204.html. You can comment here or there.

Pickled Daikon – an update

Jul28

The recipe says to wait 2 days. I tried it yesterday, and found the pickling hadn’t really penetrated the daikon completely. Today – delicious. Absolutely tasty.

However, it might actually be a little TOO sugary for me…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/963106.html. You can comment here or there.

Tropes I like Reading (& Writing) in no particular order

Jul28

Inspired by cluudle‘s post here, written in 3 minutes so probably not nearly a complete list, and much of it will not be a surprise to anyone.

Capture the flag and all variations.
Enemy prisoner, unwilling captive, angry slave
And of course the stockholm
Princess that doesn’t fit in.
Warrior princess
Warrior people <.<
Animal people
Feral people.
A top who isn’t quite.
Corrupt society and the slow fixing/surviving it
domineering society/adults/powerful people
eugenics (as a story theme!)
Gender swapping
New World
World under the normal world
Portal fantasy
Finding Kin
Taking a clever stand against authority
Unlikely romance
uneven power roles
Thick chewy worldbuilding
Especially world-building in post-post-apoc real-world
Apocalypses
post-apocalypses
rebuilt societies
prepared people
colonization of new worlds
Alien interactions

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/962670.html. You can comment here or there.

Pickled Daikon

Jul27

The picture above is what Daikon looks like on seed packets.

What it looks like when allowed to grow IRL is more like the second picture here. Picture that about the size of a small-to-medium butternut squash.

Now picture three of them, two ripped out of the ground by a wind storm.

That’s a lot of daikon.

Daikon, if you haven’t tried them, aren’t as bitey as red radishes. They work well in baked dishes, but, ah, it’s July. We’re not doing much oven work.

They also keep really really well. However, our fridge was getting rather full of long whitish roots.

So we pickled some!

(By “some”, I mean, T sat there with a mandoline matchsticking daikon until the salad bowl was over half full).

We used this recipe, trebled. We used a salad spinner to get the water out, after letting the daikon sit in a colander with its salt. I used half rice vinegar and half distilled white for cost, and I replaced the sake with ginger brandy, ’cause we had it on hand.

We stored them in three old salsa jars in the very-cold back of the fridge.

The pickling juice tasted heavenly. I’ll let you know how the pickled daikon taste in a few days!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/962002.html. You can comment here or there.

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