New Story: The Kemper Assignment

I know most of you have already found it, but today I'm officially announcing the release of The Kemper Assignment, the final chapter in the Gabrielle arc. Just a warning, this story features lots of nasty, non-consensual sex with whips, cattleprods, and spoilsport nuclear devices. No, really.

Olo!

So, yesterday, Omaha and I get this phone call from kaelisinger, asking us if we're coming to Oloteas for the monthly ritual. We hadn't thought much about it, but sure, we decide we'll go along. Since Kaeli's kidlets are doing the Girl Scout thing, it gives Omaha a chance to pick up her cookies and me a chance to buy my annual supply.

I made a vague vegan chili for the potluck. By "vague" I mean I looked at four different recipes for chili (including my favorite, which includes meat, and its cousin, a Texas "red chili" recipe) and just kinda mashed them all together: take the meat out, leave the onions in (the vegetarian recipes all had much less onion than my usual one), add cumin from the Texas red (which makes it smell like every chili you ever had in middle school), one minced chipotle chili in adobo, toss in thyme and basil (just 'cause I had some and needed to use it somewhere before it started to go) and add some portabello mushrooms because they add hearty texture. Vegetable stock, tomatoes, and kidney beans to round it out. I actually got the carrots sautee'd correctly: my carrot-fu is strong. I used the last of my limed masa harina thickening it-- must get more. Whatever it was that I cooked up, it was a hit: it disappeared by the end of the potluck. I had it and thought it a success.

I could not get Kouryou-chan out of the swimming pool, not even for the ritual. Other than dinner, she spent the entire day in the pool. On the one hand, that made life easy: I knew where she was. On the other, I still can't quite go swimming yet because of this damned rash so I basically spent the entire day on the edge of the pool, hovering and watching her to make sure she didn't drown pushing herself too hard. She's not quite drownproofed yet, although she's getting there. She's learned to be comfortable with keeping her head below water.

I did get to see a lot of people there: shemayazi, and kaelisinger, and their respective SOs, and a dozen other people whose names I can barely remember, some of them only because I put wrote down metas and names in my notebook and reviewed it before going into the Longhouse.

Yamaraashi-chan was there too, with her mother. She was cool to our presence at the beginning but like always she warms up quickly and comes to rely on our presence as much as she does on her mother's.

Kaelisinger's taller kidlet sold me three boxes of cookies. She was entertained by the bug checks Omaha and I have and are disappointed that we can only use rarely. (There's a saga behind getting these checks printed; when Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Printers changed their name (which also sucks!), they also moved to a new printing facility and lost the plates for these checks. When they recovered the plates, R&C called every customer who had requested them in the meantime and told them the plates had been found. Now that's customer service.) Nobody forgets those checks.

A nice day, but mostly random bumping into beautiful people all day long. damiana_swan seems to be recovering from her particularly nasty encounter with a dog and a bite.

When we got home, the exercise of the day had completely worn Kouryou-chan out. She was so dead asleep that my taking off her shoes and jacket didn't even begin to rouse her. I put her to bed in her day clothes.

And then she woke us at 4:00am, sick to her stomach. Lovely. Pepto Dismal didn't help. She's still not feeling good this morning. Blech.