In the first of two annoying crashes, the Mac crashed and deleted everything I’d written here. I can’t even remember what I was going on about.
In the second of two exceptionally annoying crashes, WestHost (our new web server) crashed a post I was writing at Writers Plain & Simple and erased 30 minutes worth of work. In spite of my having saved it. No. BECAUSE of my saving it: I hit “save” and the “Edit Post” page went down.
God…freaking…DAMN…it, this has been another of those marathon time-suck days. Coming up with the idea of clustering the time-sucks on specific days was good: yesterday I got some writing done. Day before yesterday, not so much, because reality inetervened. But yesterday: Bobbi got tossed in the middle of BillyBob’s king-sized bed.
What could possibly happen?
So…artichokes. Did you know you can freeze them?
Trader Joe’s sells these wonderful little baby artichokes, SO cute and so delicious. They come in packages of four. What usually happens here at the Funny Farm is that I cook them all (they fit fine in a pasta kettle), eat one, and drop the rest in a Ziplock bag to stash in the fridge.
I may (or may not) eat a second one the next day or so later. But then the package gets shoved to the back of the refrigerator shelf. And I lose track of them.
(Did you know that some people think starting a sentence with “and” or “but” sounds pompous? Honi soit qui mal y pense, say I to that. Goddammit.)
Anyway, so before long these lost artichokes spoil. And I am disgusted and discouraged.
It’s quite enough to have computer technology to make you disgusted and discouraged, without having to be disgusted and discouraged over rotten artichokes.
Freeze them:
Cook them all. (To wit: boil a pot of water; add a little chopped up garlic and a sliced lemon if you have it; toss in the ‘chokes; cook until done, about an hour.)
Take them out of the hot water and set them upside down in a strainer or colander that’s been placed in the kitchen sink. Let the water drain out and the artichokes cool to room temperature.
Place the artichokes on a tray or cookie sheet. Set this in the coldest part of your freezer. Wait.
When the artichokes are frozen through, place them in air-tight plastic freezer bags and store in the freezer until you get around to eating them.
Voilà.
This morning I posted the third Fire-Rider installment on Amazon. It only took three hours to acquire the ISBNs for that and the fourth story and then to get the present piece “published.”
This happened because of the dizzying swarm of errors I’ve instilled in the MSS. I’m laboring away thinking godDAMNit, I know I fixed that I know it I know it I KNOW it!!!!!!!
Well. Yes. I did fix it. But I stored the fixed files to a flash drive and failed to copy them back up to DropBox.
But that notwithstanding, there were a couple of errors in the “fixed” files that I hadn’t fixed.
You begin to sense the complications implicit in this chain of events? Yeah. On and on and on…
I think they’re all fixed now. But I hate Word. I hate it hate it hate it. WHY does it default to do the stupidest most ridiculous most pointless things imaginable by the techie brain? Why do you have to fight it uphill every single step of the way?
Oh Hell. Fire-Rider isn’t an unwitting iteration of the Odyssey. It’s an allegory of Man vs. Machine.
FR III isn’t online at Amazon yet (it takes awhile for these things to arrive in the marketplace. But FR II is here.
Yes, I am seeing this. I hope I can follow you over to your new site.
It looks like subscribers come with. From what I can tell folks who were reading FaM pre-West Host have been able to see the most recent posts.
That’s something, anyhow. 😉