Tag: nanowrimo2020

A Relatively Frustrating Pimsleur Day

November 21, 2020 1 of 8

Evelyn and I met up for Pokemon Go Community Day and on my way home, I finished my second Pimsleur Vietnamese lesson. First, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to need to do each Pimsleur lesson twice. When I look at written Vietnamese, I can understand it, but the native speakers on this recording don’t sound anything like the speakers in the Rosetta Stone, so I don’t know what they’re saying at all.

Also, on the way home, I didn’t get any red lights, and the parking lots on the way home were pretty small and it would’ve been frustrating to try to turn around in them and so I had Ray Brown and two Vietnamese people talking to no one in particular for probably about 15 minutes. I finally ended up putting the radio on and throwing my podcast phone into the back seat.

Now, this isn’t my normal in-the-car language approach. I usually listen to my language podcasts through my bluetooth speaker, which I can then turn off while I’m driving because it just requires me to push a button that I can find without looking at it. Trying to pause something on my phone screen, however, requires an actual complete stop.

My bluetooth speaker doesn’t work with Pimsleur, which is a real source of frustration for me not just for the “I can’t stop my podcast by touch” factor. It’s also annoying because my bluetooth speaker is much easier to hear and when I try to use Pimsleur on it (and I’ve tried with three languages now — Lithuanian, German, and Czech), I miss syllables. Like “thank you” in Czech might come out as “ději” instead of “děkuji.” So frustrating.

And it’s not the speaker. I can listen to Chinesepod lessons on it and also to Audible books. It’s just Pimsleur. Speaking of which, I’d better start downloading Chinesepod lessons again.

Well, for better or worse, November only has nine days left and I go back to Chinesepod in the car on December 1. I doubt I’ll be able to make much progress on Vietnamese in that time, particularly doing one lesson every two days, but every minute I spend will be a minute towards being able to use this language.

Our Gratuitous Amazon Link for this post is the third Discworld book. Today I bring you Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett.

Mluvím Trochu Česky

November 19, 2020 3 of 8

I’m spending entirely too much time trying to get a capital “č” for that title.

Okay. I finally just found a page with it and cut-and-pasted it.

Today I finished Pimsleur Conversational Czech. I’ve been doing Duolingo Czech for a couple of months now and am getting somewhere, but I wanted to come at it from a different angle. I have most of it nailed, except for the part about “what do you want to do?” I don’t even know.

The program seems to be geared towards businesspeople. Well, technically, business*men* on work trips to Czechia. We learn a word for “to have lunch,” but not “to have breakfast” or “to have dinner,” which is odd. I guess they don’t have breakfast or dinner meetings in Czechia?

As for why I emphasized “men” in the previous paragraph, well, like when you’re supposed to say that you want something, like something to eat or drink, they want you to say “chtěl bych,” but that’s what a man would say, for a woman, it’s “chtěla bych.” So frustrating.

Also frustrating is that there’s not a lot of time to say the sentence if it’s particularly long or complicated. I found myself skipping the “Wenceslaus” part of Wenceslaus Square and just saying the “square” part for the first two lessons after it was introduced. Now I can say “Václavské náměstí” like it’s no big thing.

I’m still working on Duolingo Czech and will be working on it until the end of November (when I switch to Duolingo Italian). And then I’ll be back to Czech in June of 2021? August of 2021? Something like that. Maybe I’ll save up for the full Czech 1 course for next year instead of just the conversational part. I will still be “Ano. Ráda”-ing instead of “Ano. Rád,” because, still a woman.

And for the last 10 days of November, I’m going to be tackling Pimsleur Vietnamese in the car. I did Rosetta Stone Vietnamese a couple of years ago and wanted to do two months of Vietnamese in December and January, but none of my games come in Vietnamese. Even if I set my phone to Vietnamese, the games that change their language according to phone settings revert to English (or at least they did the last time I checked, which was . . . a month ago?). So I’m going to squeeze in 10 days of Vietnamese at the end of my Chinese/Czech months, for this year, at least.

And our Gratuitous Amazon Link (I wish I had some good language books to recommend so that this would be less gratuitous. Alas, I don’t), we have All Fall Down, the first of the Embassy Row novels by Ally Carter.

My Poor Bed

November 20, 2020 2 of 8

I worked my way through most of those books in that photo I posted a while back and then went into Alex’s room and got more.

So now I have more FoxTrot books and a few other novels, including two that I had totally failed to put on my Goodreads page on the other side of my bed.

I’m thinking that I may have to buy ebooks for most of my collection and then take the hard copies to, like Half-Price Books to unload them. Most of what I own is books, but I own so many, that when I downsize back into an apartment, I may have to use books as my furniture.

I hope it doesn’t come to that. I think I need to make a definitive list of all of my books and maybe even start buying milk crates or something to store them in and then move them into the storage room, just to get some kind of idea of how many books I have and make some sort of plan for them.

I mean, Tsundoku is a legit hobby separate from reading the books, but I think there has to be a limit.

I was thinking I could add whether I own the book to my Goodreads page, but there are so many books there (I’m up to 295 read books), that it’ll probably take forever.

Well, I’m going to give that a shot. I’m only going to be counting books that I have in hard copy. No ebooks. No audiobooks.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, I bring you the second Discworld novel: The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett.

What’s For Dinner Tonight?

November 20, 2020 1 of 8

I only have ten days left in the month. I’ve beaten my previous record of, like, 15,000 words. Will I make it to 50,000, though? I doubt it, but let’s try.

There’s a dish in the United States called “Cininnati Chili.” It’s not really chili, per se, as it has its root in the Mediterranean and not in South Texas. I wish I’d known that earlier. Oh, well, that’s all in the past.

Cincinnati Chili can be served several ways. And they are called just that — ways. Basically, you put the chili on top of spaghetti and then you can add cheese. Then you can add beans and/or onions on top.

Just before I moved down here (Thomas had been here for a month — Alex wasn’t born yet), I went out with a friend and some of her friends. One of her friends said that we had to try Wolf Chili when I got here. So we did, and boy was he right. It was excellent. It’s got a spicy, peppery flavor, but also has a very strong flavor of cumin. Yum!

Inspired kinda by Cincinnati Chili and kinda by using up leftover chili in “chili mac,” we used to use the Wolf chili almost as a kind of pasta sauce. We then decided to add cheese, and I ended up adding dark red kidney beans, too. So now we have what is more or less “four way” Cincinnati Chili with elbow macaroni instead of spaghetti and, of course, Wolf Chili.

Alex turned out to be either a regular taster who has a low tolerance for spice or a supertaster (which is odd, since I’m a nontaster), so he ended up having this dinner (which we just called “chili mac”) without the chili — just the pasta, beans, and cheese.

When Thomas left, I knew that half of the can of chili would’ve gone to waste if I kept up that recipe, so I just dropped it out and we made chili mac Alex-style into one of our dinners. We sat down and decided to dub it “macaroni, beans, and cheese.” We thought that putting “macaroni” and “cheese” next to each other would be confusing.

Macaroni, beans, and cheese has long been one of Alex’s favorite dinners and a staple in our diet.

And that’s what we had for dinner tonight.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we’re beginning a Discworld run. I sat down and read, like, the first 22 Discworld books pretty much right in a row. Then I burned out and haven’t been back since. I’ll tackle the rest someday. For now, though, we have the epic fantasy parody novel that started it all, The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett.

My First Attempt at Roast Duck — An Ongoing Commentary

November 26, 2020 3 of 8

I started this post, then realized I couldn’t remember if this was my third or fourth post for today. So I went to my All Posts page and found that somehow all of my upcoming posts are out of order.

So I spent a while straightening that out (I’m still not done, but it’s a start) and now I’m ready to make my duck.

I just realized that I haven’t showered yet today. Crap. It’s almost 4 pm. Well, I’ll probably get sweaty making the duck, so I’ll shower afterwards.

First, I’m heating the oven to 350, which seems to be the accepted temperature for roast duck. I’m going to take the duck out of the fridge, pull the innards out,and then put them in a container for Evelyn’s dogs.

The duck is in the oven. I put some of the skin and also the fat that I pulled out while removing the innards. I’m going to save the fat for another experiment later — french fries cooked in duck fat. More on that later.

Edited to add: I totally forgot the actual first step of this duck — being unable to get the damn package open with my kitchen scissors so I used a big serrated knife which cut right through the orange sauce packet and the orange sauce got all over everything.

I removed the innards, cut off the loose skin and the tail, and ran just a little water into it so that I could see whether I got all of the innards out. I scored the skin on the breast (I missed and nicked the meat the tiniest bit in one place), then sprinkled salt onto the duck and a bit inside the cavity.

Then I stuck it on the vertical roaster thingy, stuck it in the oven, and bleached everything that the duck came close to down twice. I poured pure bleach on it and then a couple of minutes later I used generic Clorox wipes on everything. This may be the germ-free-est my kitchen has been in years.

Not that I go around cooking germy things and then leaving it. It’s just that when I cook poultry, I usually start with it a little more frozen than the duck was so that I can control the spread of the germs a little better, then I have to clean less of the area of the kitchen.

Now we wait.

I just salvaged my first bit of duck fat and I don’t know if I’m going to get enough to make it worth our while to try to make french fries. I guess we’ll see. It has, after all, only been about 15 minutes. I also realized that I forgot to put foil down on the pan before putting the duck on it.

So that’s going to be fun to clean later.

It’s 4:30 and my duck has been cooking for half an hour. Still somewhere between one and three hours (!) to go.

Really, if this turns out halfway edible, I may do this more in the future. I wish I could’ve found my actual roasting pan. I ended up doing this on a cookie sheet, which makes it kind of hard to get the fat off the pan. Instead of my turkey baster, I ended up just using a very large spoon.

It’s 4:50 and the kitchen is getting a little smoky from the drippings burning in the oven. I put the exhaust fan on medium. Let’s hope it doesn’t set off the smoke alarm in the house. It probably won’t, because it is just a little smoky. But I’m still kind of concerned.

It’s 5:20 and I just checked the temperature of the duck. It’s 160 degrees!?! I really worry that my meat thermometer is off.

I just took it out of the oven and it sure looks cooked from the outside.

It’s 5:30 and I just took it out and flipped it onto its back (a challenging proposition, given how hot it was and the fact that it was on a vertical roasting stand thing). I saw some red inside and so I checked the temperature again at the . . . hip? and it was only 145 degrees. So back into the oven it goes for a while longer.

But it’s getting there.

At 5:45, the temperature at the hip joint was 160 degrees and the liquid that came out when I poked it was just a little pink. We’re getting close to finding out if this is my dinner or the coyotes’.

At 6:00, I checked the temperature again. The hip was still 160 but the breast was 180. I figured that averages out to 170 and should be close enough. It’s just about done resting and soon we’ll see.

It’s done. Well, some of the parts are pinker that I’d hoped, and I don’t know if I’d pay money for this from a Czech restaurant, but it’s poultry, and it’s edible. I don’t think my Czech ancestors are turning over in their graves, for whatever that’s worth.

Oh, and I’ve completely forgotten how to cut poultry up neatly. I basically have chunks of duck, some with bones still in them (legs, wings) and others boneless.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Reading Update

November 19, 2020 2 of 8

This probably isn’t going to be terribly long, because I’m not sure how much detail I’m going to go into.

I just realized yesterday that a kidlit trilogy that I’ve always really enjoyed — Atherton by Patrick Carman — was missing from my Goodreads account, so I added them and now I have three new undated read books.

However, the number of undated read books has gone down overall, because I’ve finished the first six of the Avatar: The Last Airbender continuation books. And just discovered that I’m one storyline behind. Dang it.

Alex is finding my old FoxTrot books in his room and I’ve reread and marked read dates for two of them. I’m also caught up with with Ms. Marvel and almost done with The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

And since I’ve posted the second and fourth Streetlights Like Fireworks books, I figure I’d better get some read dates for the first and third books. It’s fun rediscovering that series.

And somehow I’ve got to fit some foreign language reading in there.

There really needs to be some kind of “you’ve read this; you’d like that” website that crosses forms of media and languages. I’d love to find comics in my languages that are similar to the ones I love in English.

I was kind of hoping that Kindle would do that, or that Goodreads would, but so far, I haven’t had any luck. I wonder if the Amazon sites for other countries would do any good. Time to do some digging.

But first, our Gratuitous Amazon Link. We’re back to Nancy Drew again (I went through a Nancy Drew reread a few years ago, so it’s going to be Nancy Drew on-and-off for quite a while: The Hidden Staircase, by Carolyn Keene.

What’s for Dinner Tonight?

And the night before that . . . and the night before *that* . . . .

November 19, 2020 1 of 8

Okay, so my back is all better (I think) so I’m trying to get back into the swing of posting.

As you would recall if these entries were anything like sequential, my back was out of shape on Tuesday. When I came home from work, I saw that Alex had a friend over to help with Alex’s van. So, trying to be generous (and also in order to get dinner under way and go lie down to relax my back), I pulled up the Subway app on my phone (I don’t have any other restaurant apps on my phone — I guess I should get the Popeye’s app one of these days, since I’m a shareholder and all).

I tried to order from the store closest to me and got a message saying that the location wasn’t found. Then I tried the one second-closest, and all I could see was, like, deals. I couldn’t just order a damn sandwich. When I finally got that to go away, the app said that location couldn’t be found, either.

So I tried the one in the Walmart that’s not terribly far from here, and would be easier for Alex to find than some of the others. I got my sandwich set up and, knowing what Alex’s standard order is, I started on that, and, guess what? It said that that location couldn’t be found.

So I went and told Alex that I would’ve ordered sandwiches for the three of us if the app worked, and he said that he’d be happy to go and order and pick up the sandwiches. So I left my debit card for him and went to lie down.

So I got my standard order, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, provolone cheese, and extra olives. I asked Alex to get it on Italian bread, but he misunderstood and got the Italian herb bread with cheese, which actually was pretty good. The ends of the bread were slightly crunchy with leaves and twigs, but overall, it was edible.

So that’s Tuesday.

Wednesday, I forgot about the food that I ended up eating today (spoiler!), so I ate an HEB frozen dinner of curried lentils. Now, I doubt that the cooking of this recipe is overseen by, like, Muhammad Patel* or anything. It’s probably more Indian-inspired than anything, but it’s still one of my favorite frozen dinners.

Then tonight I had the dinner that I should’ve had last night when my back was already in pretty good shape. For Black Friday, 2019, I got a George Foreman panini maker. I haven’t made any panini on it, yet, but it makes a mean quesadilla.

And so that’s what I had tonight. I took the leftover white-girl taco meat, and tortillas and put cheddar cheese in it and then cooked it until it was *just* starting to get crunchy. I liked that one so much I made another.

I still have meat left. Maybe I’ll have that for a snack later.

And now, for our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have the middle of a six-book series, and one of my favorite kidlit/ya series ever, Gallagher Girls, book 4, Only the Good Spy Young, by Ally Carter.

*Muhammad is the most common boy’s name in India in 2019 and, yes, I feasibility checked this combination.

My Back Feels Better

November 18, 2020 1 of 8

I know that this blog isn’t sequential in any way, but I’m going to go ahead and post a sequel to yesterday’s post. Yesterday, my back hurt not-quite-badly-enough-to-hurt-when-I-breathed. Today, it’s still a little twingy, but it’s way better than yesterday.

I did really well until just before 6 pm, when I finally had to sit down in a chair with a back. Fortunately, we have just such a chair in the vaccination booth. So, I put on a glove, grabbed an anti-viral wipe, and sat down for a few minutes, letting my back really relax and tilting my head back in a way I hadn’t done since I got up this morning. Then, after a couple of minutes, I stood up, wiped the chair down, and got back to work.

I wonder if there’s some kind of scuttlebutt that they might be closing the city down again. At one point the line at our pharmacy went oh, maybe a quarter of the way to the back of the store. And our store is pretty big. We had to stay a few minutes late to take care of everyone in line and then I did some shopping on my way out.

I basically bought some Apple Cinnamon Cheerios (love Apple Cinnamon Cheerios!) and soup for dinner some night (which will get a short “What’s For Dinner Tonight post, probably). The cereal, soup, and pasta aisles were all pretty picked-over. Not like they were by April this year, but kind of where they were in maybe late February or early March.

I’m trying to do a Gratuitous Amazon Link and my computer’s being a total butt. I think I need to reboot tonight. I keep clicking on the link I want, or at least think I’m clicking on the link I want. But my computer is dragging. And after all that, the next book up should have been easy to remember, because I remembered noticing that this was coming up before. We’re finally to the beginning of the Nancy Drew series, The Secret of the Old Clock, by Carolyn Keene. And this time the Kindle link works (and may be a special edition. I’m not real clear on what “a limited number of copies” means in the context of an Amazon link.

You’ve Gotta Crawl Before You Can Run

Also: I’ve gotta learn how to apply makeup quickly

November 16, 2020 4 of 8

So I went in to get my fingers printed for my pharmacy technician license renewal and they needed to take a new photo. I basically only wear makeup for photos. I don’t object to makeup on any kind of philosophical ground or anything. It’s just that makeup has always made me break out and I’d rather have bare clean skin than cover up pimples with makeup.

So I recently bought some foundation and eye shadow in tubes, so that I can squeeze out just what I need, apply it with my clean hands, then wash my hands and never have to worry about contaminating the container or the application tools with germs from my face.

So that’s what I did today, and it took, oh, a good five minutes that I hadn’t planned for. I mean, that’s not much, but my usual skin care routine is wash face, apply sunscreen, and go. So, yeah.

If I’m going to start working on my makeup application skills, I wonder how long it’d take to do a full face? Would I have to start getting up two hours before I have to be somewhere, rather than an hour and a half? It’s a pity I can’t do it the night before and just stick it on my face in the morning or something.

Oh, well. I put makeup on today and maybe I’ll do it again someday. Or maybe not. We’ll see when we get there.

And for our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have The Heroes of Olympus Book 5: The Blood of Olympus. I really do need to reread Riordan’s complete mythology series. They are so good. Also travel-y, which is huge as far as I’m concerned.

What’s For Dinner Tonight?

November 16, 2020 2 of 8

Is this my second post for today? It seems like there should be more, but yeah. I think it is.

Dinner tonight was white-girl tacos. This is not as sexy as it sounds. It’s just that the cheese is wrong and the seasonings came from a packet. The tortillas were also flour, and not corn, but a lot of Latin@ people buy the flour tortillas, so I’ll pretend like they’re authentic.

I browned the ground beef (neither Alex nor I like fatty food, so I get the ultra-lean ground beef) then added just a tablespoon of the seasoning (Alex doesn’t like spicy food). I warmed up the tortillas in a warm (not hot!) oven, then put meat, shredded cheddar cheese and chopped tomatoes on, in that order. Putting the cheese right on top of the meat makes the cheese melty and good.

No, we don’t put lettuce on our tacos. It’s pretty much the only thing we’d use iceberg lettuce for, so I leave it in the store and save it for someone who’d appreciate it.

It’s not authentic, but it tastes good, it has all four old-school food groups in it, and a pound of extra lean ground beef will leave enough left over for me to make a couple of white-girl quesadillas later in the week.

Wow. Even though I haven’t done much writing today (I’ve gotten a pretty good deal of reading done and also went out and got my fingerprints done for my pharmacy technician license renewal), I’m still pretty punchy. Instead of searching for “Calamity, Sanderson,” like I usually do when searching for my Gratuitous Amazon Link, I typed “Calamity in:inbox” like I usually do when trying to eliminate some of the crap in my email.