Not a total loss...

Yesterday wasn't a total loss. I managed, quite nicely, to wrap up about a thousand words even with the woman next to me curious about what I was doing. I blacked the screen and that made her go away. On the other hand, this other guy sitting across from me kept staring at the back of my monitor as if evil rays were coming from it and his stare could keep them at bay or something. It was all very weird.

I got home and started making dinner. It was meatloaf. I tried to be clever and instead of using a loaf pan, I used a cake pan in the shape of a Yule tree. Bad idea. Depsite the "very lean" meat, I had to pour quite a bit of fat off and the meat itself pulled away from the sides. After a little manipulation, I had it out on a serving plate but it didn't look very Christmas-y. I also cubed some potatoes and boiled them for mashed potatoes (butter, salt, and pepper!) and Omaha tossed some sliced carrots into the bamboo steamer-- yeah, a silly thing to own, but it fits very nicely above the large pot we use for boiling potatoes. It was all very yummy.

Kouryou-chan didn't eat very much, and what she did eat was Cheerios. Whatever she's got has upset her tummy badly and she's thrown up once today (that's Omaha's story to tell, if she wants) so it was bland, ordinary food for her. And lots and lots of water.

After dinner, I cleaned up the kitchen and then played Concentration with Kouryou-chan. She successfully counted up to 52 all of the cards, laid them out in a neat little grid, and then proceeded to, as she put it, "kick Daddy's butt." I mean, I cheated-- she hadn't shuffled the cards very well, and I was able to figure a pattern where pairs might be find-- and she was able to find pairs and pick them up so readily I was amazed. Was my memory ever so good?

Afterwards, it was time for bed and it was Omaha's turn to put Kouryou-chan down, so she did while I played a bit more of Halo (which has a rather nifty SFnal plot after all... right now, there are four factions fighting for control of Halo and three of them want to kill me). Kouryou-chan was too low on energy to protest this evening and went to bed without much complaint. Which was good because initially it looked like the nap she'd taken just before I'd arrived home from work might have kept her up all night.

---

( Because you can never have enough memes. Or enough excuses to put up anime images. )

Friday afternoon

So, after work, which killed all of one bug and relegated four more to the "irrelevant," "already fixed," "it's in the specification that way," and "not in this lifetime," I left the office exactly 8.5 hours after I'd arrived, eating lunch at my desk, and wandered over to the cafe' where I regularly stop for a break before heading over to pick up Yamaarashi-chan. I sat down and looked at my schedule and I had an hour to spare.

In that time I wrote 1,813 words. Good ones, too. All of them drenched in sex. Hot lesbian three-way action! (I did that just so it would show up on Google.) And with a climax (pun intended) so good that my only regret was, "Damn. I can never use that metaphor again." I wished candy cigarettes were still being made. I could have used one. Still, it's not a metaphor I'm planning on using elsewhere.

Picked up Yamaarashi-chan, stopped for cat food at Mud Bay, and then went home. Omaha said she was feeling "uncreative" about dinner ideas so I offered to make chicken noodle soup. We had all the ingredients: an onion, a stalk of celery, a carrot, diced and saute'd. Add five to six cups of chicken broth. Toss in four to eight ounces of diced chicken and a quarter teaspoon of dried thyme. Simmer for fifteen minutes, add four to six ounces of noodles and a cup of peas, and cook for another ten to twelve.

Mmmm, yummy. Not canned, so the noodles still had some firmness and the chicken some flavor. Yamaarashi-chan ate hers all up; Kouryou-chan balked and asked for ravioli instead, and we had some leftovers in the 'fridge, so I tried that. She wouldn't eat those, either. Although her fever's broken, it's hard to get her to eat. Still, she's doing much, much better. Yesterday she was hovering just below 102F.

And now it's time to put certain children to bed.

( Meme! What Evil Am I? )