If I were in charge of things around here...

I was looking forward to this post over at Daily Kos, and I got to thinking about what other pie in the sky ideas might make America even better. Because I'm just coming off three days of late nights with friends who are in town, I can't exactly remember what my ideas were, exactly, but I had some.

What are your "so crazy they just might work" plans?

Cookies and a Contest

But not a cookie contest, unfortunately.

I am making my very very favorite cookies to celebrate Tyson's last day of school, which he is celebrating by playing poker.  It is a combination of two recipes:

Kitchen Sink Cookies (with commentary)

2 sticks butter, softened but still cool (not margarine, not canola sticks, not shortening; real, honest-to-god butter)
1 cup brown sugar (the darkest you can find--better for brown sugar cookies later!)
1 cup white sugar (I used washed raw sugar last time because that's all I had, and it was good, too.)
2 eggs
1 T vanilla extract (don't be cheap; use the real stuff)
1/2 t baking powder
1/4 t nutmeg
1/4 t cinnamon
dash ginger or whatever else I'm in the mood for
1 1/2 to 1 3/4 c flour
3 c whole (not quick) oats
1/2 bag good-quality dark chocolate chips (like Ghirardelli)
1/2 bag butterscotch chips
1/2 c dried cherries (or Sunkist makes a really good mix of blueberries, cherries, cranberries, and raspberries, except I don't like the texture of the raspberries so I pick them out first)
1/4 c raisins
1/2 c walnuts or pecans (or a combination of both)

Beat butter until creamy; add sugars and beat until fluffy.  Add eggs one at a time, then add the vanilla.
With the mixer or by hand, add the baking powder and spices, then gradually add flour until combined.
With a wooden spoon, mix in oats, chips, dried fruit, and nuts.  Shape into 2-inch blobs on a cookie sheet and bake in a 350-degree oven for 10 minutes, rotate the tray, and bake 10-12 more minutes or until done.  (For super-easy clean-up, line your baking sheet with parchment.  I think this is supposed to help even out the heat distribution, but the jury's still out on that one.) Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool.  
Really, wait for a good 20 minutes or so: this is one cookie that isn't as good straight from the oven.  If you need something to tide you over, sneak a little of the dough.

So those are the cookies.  The very best thing about them is that it takes half a bag of the chips and dried fruits, so there's a built-in reason to make more before too long.  And if you staggered the chips and the fruit, you'd become trapped in a delicious cycle of cookie making.

The contest is the link Tyson posted yesterday.  First person to explain how it works wins.  Maybe if you are Tyson, or Juan or Karen who live in our back house but probably don't read my blog, you win some cookies!

Comics from Austin, city of liberal hedonism and parrot abuse

Audience Participation Day!

We haven't had one of these in a long, long time, and I'm not saying it's going to be a recurring thing, like, ever again, but I need something.



I just got this phone, my first-ever cell phone upgrade in five years, and--get this--it will actually play something other than rinky-dink midi-sounding crap when someone calls me, and it's so so easy to chop up an mp3 file into a thirty-second ringtone that even I can do it.




But the transition from picking one little midi file that I don't hate too much to hear three or four times a day out of a list of 20 or so was actually pretty simple; now I have about 6000 songs on my hard drive to choose from.




My question for you is, what is the most awesome ringtone ever? I need about a 30-second snippet of a song (sorry, the 8-minute "Mariner's Revenge" is out) or a sound effect that I will not only love, but that will make me seem even more awesome when other people hear it coming out of my pocket, and maybe also make them laugh, or believe that I am possibly the coolest person they know.

Begin Chastisement

You. Guys. Seriously. Just because my computer is not working and I cannot receive email notification of comments left on my blog does not mean that I won't know if you say anything or not. There is not, as far as I know, a blog out there devoted to my friends (real and internet) telling me I am cool, and that is the kind of reading I need to do every day.

Maybe you are not interested in my frank honesty about my silly internet crushes and how lame I was in high school. I get that, I really do. Then maybe you should say so, like "Erin, why don't you quit your bitchin' and stop stalking libertarians who are married to other people anyway." Or maybe you think you're so cool because you come over and read my blog, all smug-like, and think man, that drivel is so far beneath me I am going to go listen to some indie band no one has ever heard of over at Pandora instead of deigning to reply. To that I say, Yeah?! Prove it! If you're that much cooler than me, let's hear about it. Reading people's blogs is a privilege, guys; sometimes you've got to give a little in return.

So please. Give me something to do on the internet when I get home from school in the afternoon besides crossword puzzles.

/Chastisement

A Cry for Help!

I want to write a little program where I can put in a grid of twenty each of six different meals (T has us eating 5-6 small meals a day made of a protein and whole-grain, fruit, or vegetable carbohydrate source), where I can choose with a little radio button for each day of the week and have the results printed up in a nice neat little chart. If I felt like getting really fancy, it could also make me a grocery list. I think it would work a lot like some web apps you see for surveys and stuff. Can FrontPage do that? How about Publisher? Does anybody know?

Book Tag!

While I guess I could excuse myself, I won't because I need something to blog about today. By virtue of reading this blog, I've been tagged.

Here's how you do it:
1. Locate the nearest book that has a 123+ pages in it.
2. Go to page 123.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post that sentence and the 3 that follow.
5. Tag 5 people.

Here are mine:

Spider Jerusalem: "Surely my very presence fucks with their world anyway."
Technician Lady: "Nah. We've got a toggle on their memories. They'll accept you when they see you and forget about you and the city once you're gone."

(Book 2 of Transmetropolitan happens to be sitting at my elbow underneath a gray cat. )

Let's see.....I'll tag you, you, you, you, and you.

Start the month off weirdly

Here is something you can do for fun. Put your name in the google search box, then do an image search and see what you come up with. Here's what I got:

Apparently there's a market out there for inventing your own conjoined twins, and this is the "Erin" model.

What I really wonder is how the girl part wound up with such a nice tan. And, of course, how they manage going to the bathroom.

An Apologetic APM

Last week's APM turned out kind of sucky. That's the last time I use a Dinosaur Comic to get us started; I guess Ryan North is just funnier than you guys.

This week's APM, while also comics-related, takes a different tack.

Ok, so Tyson said he would buy me a Mac (and Illustrator, I hope!) if I write 10 installments of a comic of my own. So I need a plan, because I have a freshly-sharpened set of extra-hard pencils, nearly a whole empty sketchbook (plus like a whole box of copy paper at school), and suddenly all my ideas are stuck.

Anyway, your task today is to turn yourself (or your secret alter-ego you always knew was hiding in there somewhere) into a character suitable for comics. Give me a few important, definitive characteristics, like "smells like dryer sheets," "pathologically averse to bananas," or "on a mission to save the universe from people who say 'literally' but mean 'metaphorically.'" Then give me a situation your character might be in, like sitting in an all-night laundromat waiting for your child to be born or correcting a stranger's grammar.

If your imagination is good enough, you/your character/your situation might be featured in the first installment of my comic, which will eventually make it to the internet. Eventually.

Small steps, you know?

The Reinstitution of Audience Participation Monday

It's neat how most of our key verbs are just one syllable long!

Yes, it is.

This weeks APM likes it short! We will write a tale with just short words. It will start with a girl named Elizabeth (we'll have to call her Liz, then). Liz lives in some place with a short name, like Chad, or it could be Mars. Or the moon. (It could be that she moves lots. I don't care.)

Our tale should have some good scenes where Liz does things that we think are scary or gross, or would not want to do, such as to put one's bare feet on a bug. Each of us must add to the tale and write that Liz does a thing that is not what we would want for us.

Liz will have a bad day!

Some Fun

Your Score: House Stark

36% Dominant, 45% Extroverted, 54% Trustworthy

Responsible. Respectable. Dour. That’s not shit coming out of your ass--it’s honor. You are clearly of House Stark.

You are a submissive personality, meaning that you are more than willing to relinquish control to someone more qualified; you will unflinchingly accept any responsibility that is thrust upon you, including servitude. Unfortunately for you, your unending patience and accommodating nature often make people look to you for a leader. In essence, you are the perfect leader: someone who has no desire to lead, yet is substantially well-qualified to do it.

You are also introverted, which means that people sometimes have difficulty understanding your thought process. Your dependable nature makes you predictable, but you’ve probably got all sorts of emotional dysfunctions when it comes to more intimate relationships. There are very few people whom you trust unwaveringly, and you’re not the type to confide in other people. So cold, so aloof--so Stark.

Finally, you are trustworthy--the very definition of the word. All secrets are safe with you. All of your vows are unbreakable. True to your name, you world is a stark place; there is black, and there is white. Your rigidity tends to undercut your overall value as a friend and ally. Honesty such as yours is hard to come by, which is easy to understand when you consider how easily manipulated you are by less decent individuals. Essentially, you’re the nice guy, and you’ll always finish last.

Representative characters include: Eddard Stark, Jon Snow, and Sansa Stark

Similar Houses: Frey, Lannister and Tully

Opposite House: Baratheon

When playing the game of thrones, you play it with one sword in your hand and another up your ass.

Link: The Song of Ice and Fire House Test written by Geeky_Stripper on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

The Audience Participation Monday You've All Been Waiting For

Today's APM comes directly from the editors at Glamour magazine, which I was forced to read for 55 minutes while I sat under the dryer turning my hair pink. Actually, I heard some similar stuff on NPR this morning, so I think that serves to legitimize this week's activity just a bit.

As we all know, by virtue of being teachers, or married to teachers, or students, or parents of students, graduation season is winding to a close. Graduation is often a time for gifts, and the one gift that everybody wants to give but no new graduate ever wants to receive is advice. (Hint: Graduates want money. Lots of money. And possibly new cars, but it's best to just give them the money for that, too.)

So in keeping with graduation season, tell us,

What is the best or worst advice you've ever gotten? Explain, if necessary.

Back-to-Work APM

Yes, I took the day off, too. And I had a sub today so I could go to another meeting and tell some other teachers at a SCARY-looking elementary school all about this thing I do to help monitor student progress. And APM today is so lame, you might think I'm still taking the day off.

Whatever. In two weeks, I don't have to work any more, and I think I'm already done in my head. (What that does mean is that I'll be checking in here a little more often.)

So while I was cleaning out the closet over the weekend, I found some cute shoes that, at one time, were rather redundant, but, not wanting to get rid of them, I put away in a box. It's been a tragic few weeks in the shoe department, what with several casualties due to age, wear, and crushing discomfort, and it was a pleasant surprise to find the square-toed, light tan Mary Janes, since I have absolutely no other summery shoes except plastic Walgreen's flip-flops. Anyway, I wore them today, and now have matching dime-sized blisters on my heels. Ick.

...

In a surprising departure from Girly Shoe Land, today's APM deals not with cute-but-painful shoes, but instead with blisters. Tell me about the most awkward blister you ever got, where it was, and how you got it.

Here's mine:

I was working at a Habit for Humanity house, assembling the kitchen cabinets from cheap particleboard kits. All I had was hand tools, and the pilot holes drilled in the pieces were all but worthless. After an hour of struggling, sweating, and muttering curses under my breath (I was, after all, representing my chapter of Amnesty International), I looked down at the palm of my hand, where I had been press-twisting on the screwdriver so hard, I had not only formed but already torn off a half-dollar-sized blister right in the center. There wasn't even any way to bandage it, so it stung constantly for a week, and got all stiff so I could barely write or eat with my right hand.

Plus, it was embarrassing, and there was no way after that they were going to let me play with the power tools.

Eponymous Legislation

Frustrated watching the Dems and Republicans wrangle over war funding bills? Dreading the threat of yet another presidential veto? Does the endless debate over proposed illegal immigration reforms make you want to throw up your hands, let an undocumented worker take over your job, and move away to another country? Do daily updates on congressional "progress" make you think you could do things better? Today's APM asks you to prove it.

First, check out this list of eponymous laws. It should give you some ideas, as well as a better sense of what "eponymous" means than just hearing me say it over and over.

Then, draft your own law about how the world really works. (Don't know what to call it? That's where eponymity comes in!) Be as clever or as technical as you wish; just remember that, given the choice between wit and correctness, most people prefer wit (Erin's law).

My Great Day

My perfect ordinary day would, naturally, be a day of summer vacation. As much as I may enjoy my job as a teacher of highly-intelligent, motivated kids, and my camaraderie with supportive staff, administration, and parents, summer vacation is still what I live for. I wake up at about six. Tyson is asleep next to me, and he's actually sleeping well. We live in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse in Idaho or Montana. Even though it is June, I need a jacket to go outside and feed all the animals. We have two sheep, two goats, two llamas, and three horses. Then I feed the cats, and saddle up my horse and we go take the dogs for a run. The air is cool and swollen with humidity. There will be thunderstorms later this afternoon. I go back to the house and make coffee, then go to my studio/office to work on my charcoal portrait I am working on. Or my comics. Or my writing. Or maybe I have some raku pots to fire or something.

At about ten, Tyson has made breakfast: oat-nut pancakes and scrambled eggs with ham and cheese. Nick crawls out of bed when he smells the pancakes. We eat breakfast at a table in the middle of the kitchen, with sunlight and the morning breeze coming in through the windows. (My kitchen is awesome, by the way. I still haven't decided whether to get the marble countertops or the custom-finished concrete, but the 6-burner stove has more BTUs than you can shake a stick at!)

After breakfast, the three of us take our bikes and climbing gear and ride out into the BLM land that sits at the back of our property. Three miles in, there is a granite/sandstone/basalt canyon with a tiny trout creek in it. I can lead a 5.10 and top-rope a 5.11b. I am wiry and strong, and I don't drop things or run into stationary objects anymore.

We eat apples and sandwiches before heading back to the house. Nick goes off to do teenager stuff with friends (just not sex/drugs/crime, we hope), leaving me and Tyson alone for the night. It's about three in the afternoon, and there's work to be done before it rains later. We spend an hour or so working in the yard, me tending the vegetables while Tyson lays paving stones or builds me a trellis or something manly and shirt-offy. We want to build an outdoor living area with a fire pit and everything, but right now we just have a cheap resin dining set and a veggie patch.

Inky black clouds blow in by five-thirty, and it pours--complete with lightening and thunder--for about an hour, tops. The sky clears with about an hour of light left before sunset. I bake bread or make something fabulous for dinner (tapas?), when our friends are coming over.

We eat dinner outside on the patio and there are no mosquitoes, just fireflies (maybe we have to import them from Iowa or something). My food is great, and then we watch movies or play a game in the living room. Maybe if the moon is out we take a moonlight paddle on the lake just down the street.

Our friends go home, and we have loud sex because there's nobody around to hear it, then we take showers in the huge glass-and-tile bathroom (renovated, of course). By then, we're so worn out just from the effort of having such a perfect life that we're just exhausted. We throw ourselves into the 500-count percale sheets and fall asleep.

Audience Participation Monday

You are getting sleepy.....

You close your eyes and begin to imagine....

Listen only to the calming sound of my voice (you'll have to imagine it; my lungs are still full of yellow gunk from last week)....

Regress into the tucked-away recesses of your mind....



Today's APM is a take-home assignment (if you wish, just visit the comments section and leave a link) asking you to do some positive visualization.

I know, I know, you're wondering what sort of crystal-magic, drippy-hippy, new-age, pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo this is. But I seriously read it in another book--not a Deepak Chopra book, either. I am not making this one up.

Here's what I want you to do: Close your eyes. Then imagine the best...

Wait, wait, wait. Open your eyes again. You need to read the rest of the directions. Then you can close them.

After you close your eyes, reach ahead into the future. Go on a little mental time-travel trip, and imagine a perfect day, one that you would want to do again, and again, and again. Like if you got stuck in that movie Groundhog Day, which day would you not mind so much having to relive over and over. Start in the morning and continue all the way to the evening and describe this perfect day. The only caveat is that it has to be a normal day--no winning the lottery or getting deified or anything like that.

Because I expect many people to have a lot to say, you may write your response on your own blog and post a link on the participants section for us to follow. I will put mine in a separate post.

Everybody clear? Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!

Sub Plans for Tuesday, 5/8

Dear Guest Blogger! Thank you for taking over my blog today while I am ill! You are appreciated.

Some general things you should know about our day:

1. Beginning the day: We usually start with some banter and news-sharing. Remember to let all participants have a turn!

2. Seatwork: All participants are expected to do their own work. Whispering voices are tolerated so long as volume remains low and all talking is assignment-related. If participants cannot follow these rules, they can complete their posts in silence for the remainder of the period.

3. Ending the day: Just before the end of the post, remind participants of key details of the assignment, asking if anyone needs clarification. Remind them that their assignment is due no later than next Monday, but that it may be completed early.

4. Attendance: Please make a note of any participants who are absent or tardy this week.

5. Discipline: You should not have any discipline problems, but should something unexpected arise, there are Take-Home Detentions and an assortment of referrals on my desk. You may also send any unruly participants to these other blogs.

Today's Assignment:

Weird Internet Stuff

1. Using the Internet, participants will locate and link to any webpage, gadget, or site of interest to them.

2. Participants will be able to (PWBAT) use the a href= protocol to create hyperlinks in their responses.

3. Finally, participants will examine links posted by others and generate well-reasoned, thoughtful critiques using proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Please collect all assignments and leave for me upon my return.

Thank you! Have a great day!

E. Downey

Well, shit

It's Audience Participation Monday again, and I had the idea that we could work more on our story, seeing as how we haven't actually finished one yet, but it seems that Tammy has taken care of that one for us.

Because I had only about a half hour to come up with a plan, and Monday is a 12 hour day for me, and there are nachos and Guitar Hero waiting for me, today's game is simple.

Put on your PJs and fuzzy slippers 'cause this is a whole hellava lot like a slumber party game. No, we're not going to wait until someone falls asleep, freeze her underwear, and try to make her pee by putting one hand in warm water and one in cold. This game is called

IT SOUNDED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME...

and it is, like, the easiest APM yet. What have you done in the last 10 or so years that, in retrospect, may not have been the wisest decision you have made, even though it really, really seemed like an okay thing to do? If in the next few hours I (with your help, even) come up with some variation on it, I'll let you know. In the meantime, take it away, participants!

Same song, different verse...

...a little bit louder and a whole lot worse.

This week's Audience Participation Monday is a twist on last week's. Because I'm a little curious about what's on the other side of that door, we'll be continuing our APM Noir, except now it's gone from a film noir to an Ed Wood film. Fans of cheesy sci-fi, get yer ray guns up!

Babs, our tough-talking Brooklyner (Brooklynite? Brooklynese? Brooklyneer?) has been unceremoniously ousted from the offices of one Lazlo Kovaks. Let's leave Kovaks for later and focus on Babs. What multi-headed alien monsters await her behind the mysterious office door? What is in store for her?

So what's the catch? It seems like some people (and you know who you are) have been, for lack of a better word, hogging the yarn-spinning a bit, sometimes sending the narrative off in directions the rest of us are mildly confused by. Others of you are feeling intimidated when some among us shine a little too brightly (I'll be expecting a contribution from you this week, Brannon.). And some people just write weird shit.

It's time to level the playing field a bit. This week, you can only add to the story exactly seven words at a time. Not six, not eight, SEVEN. Articles count as a word. For strings of hyphenated words, count each word. I'll be happy to field any further clarification you may need as to the rules. After you have added your seven words, you have to wait to post again until at least one other person goes. In other words, you can't post twice in a row.

Are your warp drives ready? Your fazer-guns set to "stunning"?

It's time for the
EGALITARIAN HORDES FROM PLANET 7!!!

Audience Participation Monday

For APM, I seriously considered letting everyone make a list of times Tyson said what was true rather than what we would rather hear, but I figure you can do that in the comments over at his blog.

Today's activity is the most difficult one to date: we will craft another "story in the round" with an extra rule: you will not use any word containing a certain proscribed letter of the alphabet. As per Tyson's request, I will set two levels of difficulty, and we shall see on whose shoulders the laurels come to rest.

Our story recalls the classic 40s and 50s Film Noir style, starring a detective and a dame in distress. Think "Guy Noir" on Prairie Home Companion or that one episode of X-Files.

Our hero, Lazlo Kovacs, sits at his desk in a murky office, lit dimly by slits of light from the streetlamps, cutting the smoke-filled room. What happens next is your call. Remaining true to the genre, a blonde in a gabardine coat arrives, shows some thigh, and lights a cigarette, but that, readers, I leave in your capable hands.

Here are your letters:

E (if you're feeling up to it)

M (if you need training wheels first)