I've been having trouble with Facebook again. They don't care that many of us have perfectly good computers that have older software that is not readily upgraded constantly, so I can no longer get to my small business FB page, nor anyone else's business page. At least when it changed the personal pages (so that it now switches me to a reduced function page to accommodate molder software), it warned me of the potential of a problem. Not so the business page. Sigh. And yet everyone seems to expect that we will have an FB page. I have another option for creating a page for my business, on Earthlink, since my account there allows several web pages, but it does take a fair amount of time to set up and I have not dedicated that time among the many other things on my plate, so if it works, FB really is easier... but are there better options that would seem as acceptable? Does FB have competition? It has an amazing history. It filled a lot of unseen needs, but it has also had a lot of problems along the way, not least the advertising and spyware issues that Dreamwidth has studiously avoided (Thank you Dreamwidth!)

Does Dreamwidth include formats amenable to small businesses? Though actually, perhaps just a page with a small business name that works exactly the same as this would serve the purpose. I've seen pictures, posts that could as easily be about a business activity as a personal one. I never found any of the extra "business oriented" features of the FB business page to be useful, even if only because I didn't know how to use them.. Right now, I'd just like some token online presence so that I could share our planned craft class schedule with the right audience, especially since the local community newsletter is going through a change in leadership and other issues. Is FB really the only way to go?

 I finished the old blanket UFO I talked about a long while back - all greens on the new section, plus flattening out the fabrics in the center that didn't shrink with the cottons.

I finished a very colorful squares and rectangles crazy-isa quilt juste barely in time to get it in the Wisconsin Winter Quilt Festival this coming weekend.

My next UFO is a wedding quilt due this summer, which I've only barely started.  I'm going it will go quickly once I get going but I have to finish charting it before I can go much further: It will be a mix of two kinds of blooming nine-patch, and some Irish chain in between.

I understand there is a way to do pictures here but I haven't quite figured out that one yet.  I'll post some quilt pictures as soon as I do.

When it is too hot to walk, and sometimes when walking isn't enough, quilt design has been a great stress reliever, as if ceativity triggers the happy part of my brain.  This past couple of weeks it has been Space Quilt 3, the one for me.  I'm doing quilt as you go, 15 X some other size blocks with backing, batting, and crazy pieces that I lay out as the mood hits: mostly black fabrics, black backgrounds with silver, gold, or bright colors, and some bright colors.  Stars, planets, big flowers that look planet like, especially when not whole.  i need something more sun like yet.  I take scraps, cut pieces, lay them out.  Some blocks are just shades of black, empty space, for the contrast., some edged in darker fabrics with a loosely defined planet or cluster in the center.  Several have bis of fabric flopping over the edges.  Pin, machine sew the main seams, hand sew the smaller seams, fill central gaps.  Lots of gaps around the edges.  When I sew the blocks together, I'll see what to do about the floppy extras and gaps, but they are unplanned, so lining up will be pot luck, decide as I go, just like the individual blocks.  That should result in the block seams mostly disappearing into the overall design.  Still haven't figured out how to post digital photos, but working on it, and collecting the photos meanwhile...

I have managed some more cooking (one of my goals).  This past coupleo f weeks it has been sour dough waffles, sourdough bread with ground amaranth (the whole seed is not as sweet as amaranth flour), sourdough fruit bread is rising now and a king cake is planned when I figure out when Fat Tuesday is.  Oh yeah, and sour dough dumplings in stew.

Sour dough.  Add enough flour to make a thick dough.  Add egg, herbs if desired (I used herbs de Province this time), a dash of baking powder if you are impatient or like a really fluffy, biscuit-like dumpling.  Let rise.

Make your favorite stew or soup (I made leftovers beef stew).  Bring to a boil.  Spoon risen dough  into the pot leaving a little space around each dumpling.  Reduce to simmer and cover.  cook about 20 minutes.  Uncover and cook about ten more minutes.  To test for done-ness, cut open the largest dumpling and make sure it is not doughy at the center. 

The perennial new year activity is reviewing life and getting it going again with a fresh start or two, with new or old activities. an old activity was blogging and I'm trying to get back to doing that on a more regular basis, if only so I can keep on my e-mail. For older blog posts, you can check out my links to Explorations and Essentials, but it is difficult to impossible for me to continue posting to those at this time and their decline did not help me keep to a regular blogging schedule. Paying work also got in the way and is likely to again, but we'll see what we can do to work around it.

It is said that telling people your goal sometimes helps you achieve them so I thought I would put a few of them here. (I always have more than I can achieve, but if I have less, I tend to achieve less, so more is better and maybe extras will get done along the way)

• Cook and bake more - My sister does most of the cooking, especially when I am working long hours, but she deserves a break when I can give her one and there are some recipes I want to try
• Submit at least Red Squad to a large publisher (TOR seems the most likely candidate presently but I need to do some renewed searching in that regard) and maybe submit some other books to other publishers - which requires going through my workshop notes and making appropriate edits.
• Finish Green Squad and draft Seven Divided (third and fourth books of the space fiction series We Are Seven that starts with Red Squad)
• Quilt at least three of the quilt tops I made last year and this (I already finished three quilt tops this year, all of them started last year, but the quilting part takes longer so I have probably a dozen tops waiting, plus a few more nearly done, waiting for a border fabric or applique work or some other bit of thing to be done)  One is due in March, one is due in November.  The rest don't have deadlines or destinations, yet.
• Figure out how to submit a quilt for sale on Etsy.
• Find a new house.  (Well, that's more a hope than a goal; we already found a house but zoning and such fell through, and unfortunately, the ones that are readily fixed up to be like we want are being picked up by flippers who ruin them and want us to pay more for the privilege of rebuilding them, or they aren't for sale.) 
• Organize and clean out at least one filing cabinet
• Gut and revamp the bedroom.
• Blog at least 52, preferably 100 times this year.

Fresh Eats - Diets are heard to keep up, but a periodic fresh start or a diet-for-a-day now and again can still improve health.  My current "fave", and so far most successful diet is to simply eat 25% less (and eat better) two times per week.  Like many diets, it is still easily undone by the holidays and weeks of neglect, but better to lose now and regain than to gain first and have to lose even more later.  Here are a few fun ways to cut back for a day:

• Replace morning toast with grapefruit or yogurt
• Wrap your favorite meat salad in a couple of large lettuce leaves spread with a little ground horseradish instead of bread and mustard or mayo
• Cut your meat serving in half and put it on top of your potato instead of butter or sour cream
• Prepare your chopped vegetables for putting on rice (steam with soy sauce and vinegar, stir fry, or whatever you normally do), then spoon them over a row of steamed broccoli (or better yet, asparagus) instead of rice
• Use parsnip or celery root instead of potatoes for mashing (but this treat is an expensive substitution, so not a ready replacement for regular use unless you are more successful growing them than we have been or you are willing to increase your food budget for the health benefit)

What is your fresh start for the year?

But we are getting closer to choosing a house. There is a good chance it will, in the end, be the first one we looked at, full of imperfections but with possibilities, sources of ideas, potential, which we haven't sen in many of the other places. We have one or two more we might look at, potential on paper that may or may not have in person, then I think we're done looking. It was, after all, the first one we looked at, so maybe it was destiny.

Meanwhile, I did my Camp NaNoWriMo write-a-thon working on my third book in a series. Once it is done, I'll relook at the first one and start to try to get agent or publisher, probably starting with TOR. If not them, I can't think of any that do the kind of science fiction I do so I may try some of the e-publishers that are more like publishers and have an editor and arrange for cover art and such, not the we-publish-anything types. Maybe one of them will see some potential in my idea of science fiction, even if it seems to have taken a left turn somewhere along the way.

Odd thing. My earthlink blog got the highest number of hits in one day that I've ever had, hovering low before and after, a week or more after I posted anything. What causes a spike like that?

Yesterday I made a quilt top, from design to finished. Just a baby quilt, but still, i was impressed. I called it Scrapple - Scrappy appliqued Rag quilt. Not a lot of "rag" but I took squares, zig-zagged the edges mostly because it is a baby quilt. Otherwise I would have left them unfinished, and appliqued them down onto the background by sewing large circles. That leaves the corners a little floppy. I cut out the circles behind the appliqued pieces and though I might applique them on the alternate squares, but mostly the alternate squares have cute pictures of ducks and bunnies and cows and Betty Boop in a pink cowgirl outfit and such so I left them like that and will use the circles elsewhere. Also, some of the fabrics are older and thinner and I left the background fabric in place for strength as this is definitely more play blanket than pretty for special occasions. I don't much like the colors. I aimed for pink with a kind of aqua-green but our baby fabric selection is more to the rainbow pastels, so it has aqua-green of a few shades (the darkest was the Betty Boop), and all the baby fabric whose blues leaned in that direction, and not much pink. A few reds, lots of white with pastels. It will get a pink flannel packing and maybe a darker pink silky edge if it still matches or if I have enough blanket binding left. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next weekend, probably not today as I have many other things I need to do, including on the time-stealing computer.

We survived the storm. Noisy until 1 in the morning, and more rain than we needed but the winds were most outside the city in either direction. Still overcast and storms expected again this evening.

The roof top garden is doing well. Only a few rather fibrous radishes but a good flavor. Some of the peas didn't make it (I think the package directions were wrong and they should have been planted earlier. They didn't appreciate the 90's we had a couple of weeks back.) The sunflower seeds drowned or the squirrels ate them, but I think it is early enough to plant some more. Maybe after the current storm series is done. Squashes, beans, cantaloupe, basil, I forget what all else and we lost the labels in the rain storms so maybe we'll see, are all holding on nicely for now. The pails and waste cans we use for larger pots have holes in them, and sometimes a second set if they didn't drain fast enough the first few rain storms.

The irises are done and the day lilies are only in bud but the spiderwort and one of the climatis and several heliobores are all blooming so we have a little of purple and white front and back. The lilac still hasn't bloomed. Not sure what we are doing wrong, but the tiny struggling rhododendrun (it gets too hot here for it to be happy) finally has a full flower and it is lasting quite a while though it is mostly hidden by other plants, it has grown so little.

We are looking at houses west of Madison.

House Hunting went a bit better this time with some candidates in reasonable price ranges, that is, the price was sometimes lower if it needed lots of work. Nothing we totally fell in love with but a lot better than we had found elsewhere.

Made me aware how close we are coming to considering actually moving. Relative terms, but given how much time everything seems to take these days, close enough to be a prod to get some things done with the chaos here.

Got a story done and realized that one of the reasons that it seemed more let down than achievement (it isn't, after all, instantly published) is that I don't celebrate the fairly big step of just finishing. I haven't figured out what is a good way to celebrate, but I have to come up with something that I can do, and something that I can do each time I finish, (or publish or other major step) as an incentive and self encouragement. I need to do the same thing with my quilts, too. I sometimes let them sit unattended when i near completion, as if finishing were a bad thing, and I'm sure it is because I never tell myself finishing is a good thing. It's just a thing followed by figuring out what to work on next.

When I was working on my history studies, I celebrated the completion of papers by watching Harry Potter (the third one, I think, which had come out in video just before). Always the same one, but it was a celebration and a watchable movie every time, so it was a good incentive when I got really tired of the research. I never get tired of writing, but that's almost a disincentive to "finish", so maybe the reward serves a different purpose, but no less needed. maybe a reward of reading, instead? What indulgence would cheer me that I usually don't take?

This one is a modification of a recipe i had for King Cake, and is easily varied. All amounts are approximate.

Your favorite bread dough recipe, one loaf worth, uncooked
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup chopped dates
1 T cinnamon
1/2 t. nutmeg
1/4 c butter
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. ground almonds or almond paste or ready-to-make marzipan (dice finely if stiff)

Glaze:
2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 c. softened butter
3 T milk
Mix butter and sugar.  Add milk to form a very thick liquid.

Let bread dough rise in a bowl, per usual instructions.
Mix butter, brown sugar, and spices
Add almond paste
Spray a jelly-roll pan or large baking dish with oil.
Spread bread dough on flowered board to form a rectangle about 12 x 18.  The edges can be a little thick.
Spread butter-sugar mix across bread dough.
Sprinkle nuts and dates over the dough.

From one of the short ends to the other--use a butter knife to loosen if it sticks to the board--roll the dough and filler up, stretch the thick end a little and press to seal the roll.  Tuck the ends under a little and roll loaf onto the seam as you place it on the greased pan.  Spread top with a little oil.  Allow to rise.  It may not rise to full double and will probably take longer than usual to rise due to the weight of the filling.  To hurry it, heat oven to 250, turn oven off, place loaf inside, and allow to rise 1/2 hour.  Repeat if needed.  Bake at 350 for 25-35 minutes until lightly browned.  Brush with water.  Allow to cool a few minutes, then pour glaze over the top.

We turned the tv off as soon as the state of the union address intros started.  The newsy pre-brief summary of both the president's speech and the opposing response set my teeth on edge.  We had just been discussing that the Democrats had been promising to get rid of the disaster they call "No Child Left Behind" which seems intent on putting all students behind where they could and should be, but all that the summary said was to push for preschool for all Americans, as if it matters what we teach tots when their later education is going to be a disaster. 

I got a chance to review some high school history texts when I was in grad school, with high school teachers among my fellow students.  Writing appropriate to he reading skills of upper elementary school at best and about as skillfully written as if by a high-schooler, with such a distorted focus on tiny pieces of history that a student reading it would know nothing of historical events or their cause and effect by the time they were done with the course, but they would have huge illusions about what could have been if the world were sweet and rosy and everyone had had equal opportunities for all of time.  The wrong lesson no matter how I look at it.

Anyway, I wasn't going to be happy with anything either speaker said and even the topics were pushing up my blood pressure so I have a movie and my computer for the evening.