Tephra

I called in today to find out where I could park for jury duty on Monday, if I had to report in (I was planning to wait until after 5 to call, in case it didn't get settled until late this afternoon). I found out how the parking works, which is super easy, but more importantly I found out that ALL my potential trials have been canceled. My service is complete and all I ended up needing to do is to get excused for last Monday since I was in California.

I am feeling a bit at loose ends at the moment... I had a schedule for the next week and a half. :D

I've tweaked this a bit from the original, and I'm including some tweaks I haven't tried yet but I am certain will work.

You will need a crust for a single crust 9" pie. I like using a shortbread crust for my sweet pies. The recipe makes enough for a double crust 9" pie but it freezes well, so you can save the second half of the dough rather than cutting the recipe.

Since my crust has a lot of butter in it I omitted the one tablespoon of soft butter that the original recipe requires to be rubbed over the crust before filling.

Pie Filling:

¹/₄ c + 1 Tbsp sugar
¹/₂ tsp cinnamon
3 eggs
¹/₂ tsp vanilla
2 c applesauce

Optional crumb topping:

¹/₂ c chopped walnuts
¹/₂ c flour
¹/₃ c brown sugar
3 Tbsp soft butter^*

Preheat your oven to 450°F

Prepare pie filling by blending the sugar and cinnamon together to avoid cinnamon lumps in the finished pie. Beat in eggs, then add the vanilla and apple sauce. Pour into your prepared pie crust. If you aren't using the optional crumb topping, dust the top of the pie with cinnamon.

To prepare the crumb topping combine all ingredients in a small zipper bag (sandwich size works perfectly) and massage until well mixed and crumbly. Sprinkle over the pie filling. Some of it will probably sink into the pie.

Bake the pie at 450°F for 15 minutes.

Reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and bake for 30 additional minutes.

Cool completely before serving.

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* This is the untested tweak. The original crumb topping recipe called for 1/3 cup of butter. The pie with this butter rich version of the crumble is in the oven right at this moment so I can't tell you if it worked yet, but I think less butter would be better in any case.

Remember how I pruned my bookmarks from 3500+ down to under 700? Well thanks to Firefox Sync being stupid they are all back. You see I fired up the laptop, which I forgot was set up to sync, and it put them all back in the version on the sync server, since it does that without asking you if it should even if there are huge discrepancies between the two files. So of course, when I booted up today my desktop synced and FUCK they're all back.

Really, is it so hard to make a sync service that designates one machine as the Master so when you tell it to use that machine's data to overwrite the sync data it then doesn't let the subordinate machines fuck it up?!

I need to go in on the laptop, delete the bookmark file there, and then redo all the bookmark clean up that took me weeks all over again.

Fuck you, Firefox Sync, with a porcupine, sideways.

This is a slightly modified version of a recipe I discovered via Pinterest. I've doubled the amount and adjusted the seasoning.

Note that ¹/₄ cup + 2 Tbsp equals ³/₈ cup, if you are fortunate enough to have a ¹/₈ cup measure.

3 lbs boneless skinless chicken breast cut into 1.5-2" chunks
1 c flour (approximately, for dredging)
vegetable oil for frying

1 can (12 oz) orange juice concentrate
¹/₄ c + 2 Tbsp brown sugar
¹/₄ c + 2 Tbsp ketchup
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 Tbsp salt
¹/₄ tsp red pepper

Dredge the chicken pieces in flour and brown them on all sides. You don't have to cook them through, just get a nice golden brown on them. Put the browned pieces in the crock. Unless you have a much larger pan than I do you'll have to do the chicken pieces in 2-3 batches.

Mix up the other ingredients in a bowl and pour it over the chicken in the crock. Give it a good stir and cook on low for 4-6 hours.

I cooked this batch 6 hours as the recipe stated but I think it would have been fine with just 4 hours. My crock has a notorious hot spot and with all the sugars in this recipe it got a bit dark in places even though I stirred it every couple hours and turned the ceramic liner end for end half way through. It still turned out tasty though. :9

It's been a week, I should probably update those of you that care.

When last I wrote on the subject I had mentioned thinking about jumping my key character, Karen, up three years in age. I did do that. Scrivener's index card synopsis feature and document notes made it really easy to just to through and leave myself notes about the new age she should be in each chapter. So I did that on the eighth while finishing up chapter three.

While ending chapter four I noticed something I really should have noticed before NaNo even started. I had misplaced the blue moon. So, after beating my head on the desk for a bit, I went and fixed that. One index card on the cork board dragged from the end of the manuscript to the beginning and then going and readjusting all the ages again took care of the bulk of that. Now I have four chapters to either rewrite or time shift plus one entirely empty new first chapter.

Then, while writing yesterday, I had a flash of either brilliance or insanity. I've been having a lot of trouble writing this story, which is nothing new since I've had that problem with previous NaNo stories, but I have a pretty good idea of why with this one. The first problem I've already addressed some, that's Karen's young age. Shifting her three years older helped but it still means when I go back and rewrite the beginning I'll be writing a four year old. The other is that I'm writing this four (and five, and six, and...) year old child in a world with a level of technology roughly equivalent to the late eighteenth century. Now I don't think I'm quite as badly off as most Americans are with history, and growing up in Massachusetts gives you mandatory history of things like Plymouth, Salem, and field trips to Old Sturbridge Village, but this doesn't help that much about two and a half decades later when you need to know the minutia of daily life in the late 1700s.

So, the flash of possibly insane brilliance... what if I hadn't set this story in the past? What if I had set it in an alternate universe current time? Like I did with my last two NaNo stories (which is probably why I didn't, at least subconsciously). If I did shift it to a "modern" setting, could I make it in the same world as my 2009 NaNo story?

That one, for those that don't want to go looking at my old posts, didn't really gel into a single story. It ultimately fractured into a bunch of flashbacks as I was struggling to get to 50k at the end of the month. I had decided that when I got back to it I would probably break it up into a series of short stories.

I wrote a lot of notes yesterday, about what I would need to do to shift this story into the same world as the one from 2009. There are quite a lot of things that would have to be changed to make it work. The culture between alternate magical late 1700s and alternate magical early 2000s is very different. I wrote down all the ones that came to mind immediately and the wrenches they threw into my plot (I actually have one this year) and some possible solutions.

While I was doing that I was also wondering if I could, or should, introduce these characters to the ones from 2009. That lead to another flash of inspiration and now I have to change Apollonia's career over in the 2009 story. Changing that makes the story that was trying to evolve around her so much easier! It's enough to make me want to beat my head on the desk some more because it was so obvious what her career should have been. Looking back it was really clear that I was subconsciously shoving her in that direction even while I was trying to write her story. So I have a pile of notes about how I need to change her career, and how by doing that I can take those sections of the story that didn't fit together that well and shuffle them around and suddenly it all works.

I think, if I weren't using Scrivener this year I would have had a meltdown over this story. I would either have one long text file with several chunks separated by white space and notes and would have been scrolling through it for ages trying to keep all the notes updated. Or I would have splintered the file into multiple new files and would have had to splice them to do the final word count verification version. Scrivener lets me keep all those outdated bits I wrote in discrete chunks and allows them to be included in word count without forcing them to be in the same file as what I'm working on now. It also lets me write notes and keep them separate from the story. If you hadn't guessed, I really, really like Scrivener. :)