My book series idea

I've been reading a bunch of erotic romance lately, of various subtypes. It's not "high literature", but I've been enjoying it. As with any other genre, themes start to become apparent sooner rather than later and a big one in romance novels is idealization. Yes, the characters aren't perfect people, or there would be no plot line, but the men all tend to share this desire to "take care of" their women. Which tends to translate into a lot of ice cream, chocolate, wine and of course, hot sex! (It's perhaps another sort of idealization to hope that you could have enough sex to burn off all those calories, but it's nice to dream big.)

And I am just as susceptible to suggestion as the next, so when Stuart and I were in Red Deer the other day, I suggested a stop at Marble Slab before we got on the highway for home. I was really excited about this treat, so when we pulled into the strip mall and saw all the "retail space for rent" signs, I was kinda pissed off. In a romance novel, we would have gone to the next Marble Slab store, but in reality, it's an hour's drive away and not really feasible.

As I was brooding on the drive home, it occurred to me that another food fixation commonly found in these books is coffee. The hero is often shown as being truly interested in the heroine because he knows how she likes her coffee and will show up at unexpected but needed times with a take-out mug of her exact order. I suspect that this fascination with coffee reflects the drinking preference of authors, who can be deadline-driven, over-stimulated kinda folks. *smile* And to be fair, the odd cup of tea will appear when the heroine has had a shock or a mug of hot chocolate when something more dessert-y is called for.

So my idea for the theme of a new series is tea. The hero will know what kind of tea the object of his affection prefers for various settings and how to sweeten and/or milk it to her preference. She will sit around with her girlfriends and discuss the varieties of oolong and whether "herbal tea" is a proper designation or if it should be tisane.

I'd read it.

Sharing a bed

I love my sweetie and I love sharing a bed. Another body to warm up the sheets, the sound of breathing and the smell of him are great. It's a lovely way to sleep, knowing that you aren't alone. However, it's not all fun and games.

I tend to migrate toward the top of the bed and I can't sleep if the covers aren't tucked all the way around my neck. He migrates to the bottom of the bed (he likes to sleep with his feet hanging off of the end!), and he prefers to have his feet fully covered. This presents a challenge to the poor bedding. Not too mention that he sleeps warmer than I do and he has this habit of bunching up the covers to sleep on when he's too warm. Which means he is stealing them from me!

We talked about putting King size bedding on our Queen size bed, in the hopes that there would be enough extra to make everyone happy. But I feel like I need some way to anchor the bedding down. However, I can't think of any feasible way of doing that that wouldn't be uncomfortable and trap us in the bed! LOL Ah, the challenges of life together.

Who'd have thunk?

I haven't been getting paid, but I have been keeping pretty busy. Stuart and I have been repairing the walls and I've been painting over all the purple. I've sure been pulling dandelions out of the yard. Bags and bags and bags of the bloody things. 

I managed to bring the kefir grains to the new house without killing them and we are continuing to have kefir regularly. And I recently traded a girl some grains for a SCOBY and I have my second batch of kombucha brewing. This time I've tried adding flavour, so in a few days, we'll have strawberry flavour and ginger flavour. I never got the compost to really get going at the old house, so I've been looking into vermicomposting instead. Along the way, I ran into the idea of bokashi, so hey, maybe we can add more fermenting! I need to do some more reading, but I do like the thought that we could compost things like meat, bones and dairy, which usually can't go into compost. 

We've been making all kinds of yummy food: shrimp mousse, pulled pork, lots of Victoria's yummy beef, bacon and yam hash for breakfast, chicken wings and much more! I still make our mayo from scratch - by now I think the jarred stuff tastes pretty lame. I've been remembering to take my vitamins and the dogs and I have started taking Golden Paste. It really seems to be making a difference for my various aches and pains and Ursa is much perkier and happier to play with Jenner.

I've been working on sewing projects. I got a stuffed "rubber" ducky made for Heidi's belated Christmas present. I'm making some folders for SCA charters. I made curtains for the master bedroom out of blackout material, so that helps with all our sleeping. The first coronation for our new SCA kingdom is coming up next month, so I'm hoping to have some new garb made for us.

I was thinking about all this madness today and realized something; I am, in some part, becoming the adult that I imagined when I was younger. I wanted to be confident and healthy and to be able to make stuff. I'm still not rich or famous, but I guess I am making headway on the others. I thought that I would feel like I had my stuff much more together than I do in order to achieve all this, but I guess not.

Well, I haven't been here for a while!

There is no way I am going to try and "catch up" from my last post. Just here to get a thought out of my head.

When we moved and I knew that I was going to be spending most days at home with just the dogs, I knew it was going to be a challenge. Not because of loneliness or boredom, but because of food. With no one here to "police" me and having access to a vehicle, the temptation to nip out for junk food was definitely going to be strong. And ongoing.

So I decided that what I needed to do was have food on hand that was enough of a treat, that I'd rather eat it than go out for something. It didn't necessarily have to be 100% healthy, but you know, the more so the better. Almost anything I made was going to be better than fast food, by default. And by preference, it should be something I could make several meals worth of at once or be something very quick and simple to put together.

And I've been doing pretty well. Chicken wings are a staple - call me weird but I like stripping meat off of bones and wings are perfect for that! Served with my home made ranch dressing, I could eat them for a week running without getting tired of them. Last week, I was going through my recipe book looking for something else, and I found Stuart's mom's shrimp mousse recipe. This is something that she usually only makes at Christmas and we all descend on it like locusts. It's made with canned tomato soup, but I may play around and see if I can replace it with tomato paste and spices, to reduce the sugar and salt load. And it involves a ridiculous amount of cream cheese, so it's not low fat.

But I made a big double batch for this week, and it's a lot yummier than a frozen pizza, which is what I was craving last night. She normally serves it with crackers, which blows the gluten reduction, but it's equally tasty with veggies or just off a spoon.

Combined with all the dog walking, I'm at least not putting on weight! Next to work into the routine: Pilates workouts - cause YouTube has all kinds of videos!