Dreamflower's Mathom-house

Yesterday the letter carrier was very good to me. Last week I ordered THIS T-shirt in the long-sleeved version, in dark blue. It was in the mailbox yesterday, along with another surprise.

About a month ago I took part in a survey put on by OSU, mostly stuff about politics and the environment. I'd completely forgotten about it, but they'd promised me a $10 Visa gift card. That showed up yesterday as well.

Today we went to Stillwater for some necessary errands, and I wore my new tee, and we went out to breakfast at IHOP, and I spent my Visa card at JoAnns (I got a book on Zentangle and a ball of variegated cotton yarn for dishcloths.) I had a 40% off coupon, so even though I went just a few dollars over the ten, both items combined were still $5 less than the book by itself would have been!

Then we did a little wandering around some second-hand and antique stores to find a new end table and lamp for the living room. We found a great table--a really nice Ethan Allen piece with a drawer and a shelf, for only $40, and they had hankies! I picked up two nice ones, one a floral print border, the other one with white on white embroidery, for only $3 apiece! No luck on a lamp yet, though.

Does anyone else on my flist use hankies instead of Kleenex or other tissue? I really prefer them--they are soft and environmentally friendly! Plus, they make me feel hobbity. I have several. A few bandanas and some nice old fashioned ladies' handkerchiefs. The two I got today give me an even half-dozen.

Is now streaming:

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6319735/the-hobbit-song-premiere-billy-boyd-the-last-goodbye

This gave me the shivers; that was Pippin singing, not just Billy. In my minds I could just see Peregrine Took standing on the shore singing this tribute.

I got this warning through fanficrants. Apparently a website has cropped up that is trawling through LJ, looking for anything tagged fanfic, and then reposting it WITHOUT PERMISSION.

Here is a link: http://www.donotlink.com/framed?561309

The link diverts you from the original. It takes you to a separate page that will not show up on search engines, in order to defeat the thief's purpose of attracting search engines. (The site is full of advertising.) But as you can see, a lot of people have been complaining.

I don't know if any of my friends may have been victimized, but there's a Complaint Page, which you can go to and make him take your stuff down.

I don't have time right now to see if he's lifted any of my stories, but I will be checking as soon as I can.

(And I'm using my fanfic tag so if he steals this entry he won't be getting any real fanfic, LOL!)

In case you have not heard, the Henneth Annun Story Archive (known as HASA) will be shutting down at the end of the year!

An effort is underway to rescue stories that are not found elsewhere. The details can be found here.

If you can help, the post will explain how; if you can't help, please consider passing the information along! The project can use all the signal-boost it can get!

I came up with this the other day. It's a combination of several recipes I came across.

Watermelon Lemonade

8 cups of watermelon pulp
Juice of 2 large lemons
1/2 c. sugar (or the equivalent in your preferred sweetener)
Water
Ice

1. Put the pulp in a blender and blend on high until it is slushy. Pour the pulp through a fine mesh strainer; you should have about 6 cups of watermelon juice.
2. Pour the watermelon juice and the lemon juice into a 2 quart pitcher.
3. If using sugar, make a simple syrup of the sugar and an equal amount of water, heated until the sugar dissolves. Otherwise use your sweetener as directed. Add to the pitcher.
4. Add more water and some ice until the pitcher is full. Serve icy cold.

This was SO good! Nearly all the other recipes called for the simple syrup and a larger amount of sugar than I specified. I think that would have been way too sweet. But I decided to use Truvia instead.

I've been on a watermelon kick this summer, devouring more of it this year than I have in a long time!

While doing that "Books Meme", I was reminded of the author of the Doc Savage books I used to read and collect in the 60s and 70s. Lester Dent (pen name Kenneth Robeson) wrote hundreds of short pulp adventure novels, and at one point wrote down his secret of success. It can be found here: Dirty Thirties: The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.

While a bit crass and cynical in expression, the advice he gives really does show how to write a page-turner in most genre fiction, and when I think about it, most of the successful adventure-oriented fanfics I've read tend to more or less follow the outline (word count excepted, since there's no such strict word count for fanfic as for pulp novels which were closer to novellas than true novels). But the story more or less divides up along the same lines!

Of course, the catalyst in his adventure stories was almost always a murder, but it could be adapted to other genres with a slightly different catalyst.

Dent never really thought of himself as an artist--he considered his pulp writing a job, and considering the times, he made a very good living at it.

In spite of having to work yesterday, I've had a rather nice weekend. Yesterday the DH and the DS got our dryer into the house, into the utility room! The dryer had been out in the garage, unuseable. When the delivery man had told us it wouldn't FIT in there, we went with our contingency plan of putting it into the garage--but then found that putting the proper outlet in there would be cost prohibitive. Finally with a tape measure we found that if we were careful it would fit--there was barely 1 1/2" leeway, and the washer faces in one direction and the dryer in the other, and the dryer is a little crooked due to the vent hook-up. But now, months after we bought it, we are finally able to dry our clothes in it!

Today after church the DH and I went in to Stillwater to have lunch at Red Lobster and to go to the library. Lunch was very nice; he had a platter with lobster, shrimp and crab, and I had rainbow trout with lemon garlic butter sauce; we also shared a dessert. We are both still full, and not in the least interested in supper!

My boss called and asked me to come in two hours early tomorrow. I said yes, since she's in a bind otherwise. But I am on the schedule way more days than I want to be. My usual shift is a chunk right out of the middle of the day, and it makes it really hard to do anything creative (like writing). Still, I'm hoping that it will ease up and I can go back to a slightly longer shift and fewer days. They've made some new hires--I just hope they stick, because we really need more people in the market part of the store.

This was an interesting article. I'm not sure that I agree with their "nine fandom personality profiles" or that they really understand fandom, but still interesting. How long before someone turns this into a quiz, do you suppose?