After an entire day yesterday over at   suemars ' , making candies and cookie dough, Charles decided to make his customary, yearly See's fudge.  He dug the yellowed Los Angeles Times recipe clipping out of his recipe box.   IMHO, this recipe is THE best; but then anything with the See's name on it is. 

In need of something to take my mind off of this day's post-dialysis funkiness, I offered to help.  I heated and stirred, and stirred, and stirred, and stirred and stirred, and stirred...the sugar, condensed milk, and marshmallow mixture.   He then blended, and blended, and blended...well, you get the picture. Two batches in the fridge, one with walnuts, one without, which now need to GET OUT OF THIS HOUSE!! Charles wants to include some in a gift plate he's making for me to take to dialysis on Wednesday.

Speaking of dialysis and Xmas presents, Holly, the social worker, came around to each chair today, and gave each patient a blue scarf and mitten set with the company logo, and a Xmas card signed by each staff member.  Plus, they had a quite nice boxed lunch for each of us. Mine's in our refrigerator now.  A sweet gesture.

Holly and I have a rather interesting relationship, as she has told me (in private) that she looks on me as an unofficial advocate for the other patients.  Among other things, every chair now has an individual TV with headsets, so patients no longer have to share channels, and there's much less noise in the room.  According to her, I did that.

What I *did*, upon being promised that very thing on my first day, and then having it not materialize for a couple of months, and then have the existing TV's go on the fritz for another month, was be my usual relentless self.  I arranged a meeting with the powers that be, and proceeded to tell them point blank that their priorities were just a tad screwed up.    I ended with, "If anyone here thinks that things like this are not a priority, I will be very happy to set you down, personally insert your needles, and leave you to your own thoughts for four endless hours, three times week, year after year.  The TV is the only diversion for some of your patients.  You may think that you know what it's like, but I can guarantee you that you do not."

The TV's were purchased and installed within two weeks.

In spite of the above, I am very grateful for the caring staff at this facility.  They make a shockingly low wage in relation to the difficulty of their job.  But you would never know it, and *that* is deeply impressive.

Okay, a break from the songs for a great comedy bit deconstructing one of the most annoyingly sappy Christmas songs of all time..."Christmas Shoes"....Thank God for Patton Oswalt.

Talk about real life crossing over into my fandom/geekdom life...last night we were watching Mickey's Twice Upon A Christmas and this trope came up. My wife wondered aloud when did Goofy have a son and I laughed, trying to explain today's trope: The Canon Immigrant to her while using terms like canon and Harley Quinn. I made no headway. She just nodded her head dumbly and went along with it.


I was a huge fan of Batman: The Animated Series when it was out. I still think it is one of the finest animated programs ever created. From that came some of the greatest examples of this trope ever. And I'm not just talking about Harley Quinn...the TAS version of Mr. Freeze was incredible, amazing and some of the best storytelling I've ever seen.

Check the list, any pop out at you?

I'm alive, really, just been trying to write the SHORT STORY FROM HELL! And got distracted by the pretty, pretty layout that thewatchmaker did for my RP/Fanfic journal. Go check it out at 1breath, it is so made of smexy!

Of course this meant that lizfirestarter and I had to look for smexy new Scully icons. So that wasted an afternoon with the two of us drooling over pics of my fav FBI agents.

It's funny, I had a mad idea yesterday for an online RP just for FBI characters, there's so many FBI shows on TV, and characters that could probably fit in the FBI. But then I thought that would be boring as hell to everyone but me.

I am a geek.

Anyway, come Jan 1st I promise I'll start posting real stuff in this journal, my brain died with school and I need to be more diligent about writing in here. Besides, it gives me practice on something that isn't crackfic.

In the meantime, you never know, I might be in jail with one of you one day. Follow the meme below.

Using only four words, tell me what you would say to me if we woke up in a jail together.

Then copy and paste this into your own Livejournal and see what responses you get.

Got through Part One last night...didn't need much work...but it was time consuming. I think it all moves the story forward. I'd like to say I'm working on Part Two...appropriately enough "Yule"...but I spent the morning out doing a couple of things that needed to get done. I'm still short one Christmas present short and didn't think of a great place to get it until after I was home for like an hour. I'll try to go after school tomorrow. And now that I'm home, I've got a couple of letters of recommendations and some punishment assignments for the seniors to write before I even open files and start writing!

For the moment though? Christmas Vacation! Sweet. Is Rusty still in the Navy?

We're almost there folks! This one has it all: Will Ferrell, a great song and Zooey Deschanel singing in the shower:

I figured out that it's not that I don't have time to be working on my writing, it's an energy thing and I have very little right now. But we're pushing a month now since all this unfolded and I really need to get to work, I'm just totally unsure how to start.

I've done so a couple of times in the last few days, only to stall before I got moving. It doesn't help right now that I've got Natalie sleeping on my shoulder and the dog squeezed between me and the recliner arm so I'm using her as the arm. We're not talking optimum comfort.

Plus, I'm in complete vegetable mode right now and I'm watching the Travel Channel's Disney marathon...I want to go back...my dream is that I'll get to take my family (the wife, Nat, wife's sister, brother in law and my niece) for Halloween with "book" money...but FIRST I have to finish the rewrite dammit. It all comes back to that! (Yah, I know...all that counting chickens and hatching....)

Anyway, here's hoping I can get into gear!

For my paisans...

Okay, I've become incredibly obsessed with the brilliant website Television Tropes and Idioms. I'm pretty sure I could spend MONTHS perusing the sight and still not get enough. I have to admit I'm using it to help my writing, embracing the ones I love, lampshading the ones that need it or rejecting the tropes I loathe. Well, I've decided to add a new bit to this blog...my trope of the day...it won't turn into a daily thing really, but when I come across one I want to discuss, I'm going to do it...today's? The Award Bait Song.

I LOVE this one. It appeals to the Broadway musical loving side of my personality. I love a big number over my credits that's also a motif in the movie's score. These are the songs that get heavy rotation while I'm writing. I'd done a poll a while back about something similar to this that I can't find right now. Among my favorites? "All For Love" by Bryan Adams, Sting and Rod Stewart, "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" by Bryan Adams and, of course, the queen mother of all Award Bait Songs: "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion. (I am a fan...seriously...on the iPod I'll hear "Enter Sandman" followed by "I Drove All Night") It's these melodramatic, over-the-top songs that help mold my mind into a more "theatric" tone when I'm writing, like I'm trying to imagine the book as a movie already.

If I had my choice, all time, I'd lean towards Celine or Bryan Adams to sing one for one of my novels turned into a movie, though I'd also consider Beyonce or Jennifer Hudson. It'd have to be a powerful ballad, though I don't think that there's a place in Winter for a song like this, but maybe there'd be one in Sisters of Khoda.

What about you? Are there ones you like? Loathe? Who would you choose? Why?

It seems a lot of folks like the Tinker Bell that Charles placed atop our tree this year.

The last few years we lived in Los Angeles, we started a tradition of sorts by going to Disneyland for Thanksgiving.  We had a lot of friends in LA, but no immediately family.  So, rather than just the two of us sitting down to a Jeff-cooked turkey, etc., someone mentioned that that was a very good day to go to Disneyland, as there wouldn't be very many people there.  Not true, we discovered, but it still became our thing to do for those last three years.  Charles' face would positively light up when Thanksgiving was mentioned.  Disneyland!!!

As a matter of fact, the very first Disney year we had no Thanksgiving dinner at all.  We didn't really want to eat there - lousy food, huge prices, LONG lines - so we drove home to LA and EVERYTHING was closed (after all of those years living there, we never even thought that that could happen in LA - there's always *something* open.)   Every restaurant, every store - EVERYTHING was closed.  And...we had no food in the house.

Anyway, they have/had a Christmas shop in the New Orleans Quarter, where we purchased (in different years) Flora, Fauna, and Merriwether(sp?) (Sleeping Beauty Fairies) and....Tinker Bell.

I had forgotten about her until she reappeared on top of this year's tree.  I forget about a number of things like that, but Charles' memory for such things is photographic.  He disappears up into the attic, and comes down with boxes of this stuff.

I have no idea just what's up there.

Apparently, Tinker Bell.

Want a Kindle II? For free? Well, sort of...all it takes is a couple of clicks. And you get a subscription to a pretty cool writing/book blog in the process. Check it out!

Ho hum. Uni work done, now just revision, and to get cracking on that bloody dissertation of mine. Blah. Not feeling particularly communicative at this point, will try and post something more chatty soon!

moved the tree to another room, and decorated it today and tonight.  As he was doing all the work, he decided to use tinsel.  We haven't had tinsel on our trees in all the years we've been together (although I grew up with it.)  I like it. We have (at least) four tree toppers. This year he chose Tinkerbell.

I've got a silly request for the hivemind. I SHOULD be able to answer it once the wife gets home from Christmas shopping and I find the rest of the power supply for my old Dell, but I can't wait that long. Anyone know of an artist/writer website with the name rose or fox or both in the title. The story follows a young lad and a civil war of some kind, IIRC. It's driving me nuts because the art work was top notch to my eyes and I wanted some "inspiration."

Thanks