1. I would like to know who is responsible for cutting 2 hours out of my day. That’s the only way it’s possible that by the time I finish all the stuff I have to do, or decide what I’m going to ignore, it’s time for bed and I got no where near enough writing done.

2. Why, WHY, when I have a sign on my door that says “DO NO DISTURB unless you’re bleeding, maybe” do people think that means “HEY CAROLYN WANTS TO TALK!”

3. I have the cutest shoes ever in the world. They have sparkles! But I think they’re making my feet hurt. ::cries inconsolably::

4. Who put all this junk in my room? And WHY, after I spend an hour throwing a bunch of it away, is there MORE of it? Why?

5. My email is breeding. Great. Because that means it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the bits and bytes start doing the same thing. Don’t turn your back on your computer for a minute.

Some good news

1. Page proofs came for Not Proper Enough. I finished them in a day. I think it came out good.

2. Arjun Rampal tweeted a link to video of him doing a shoot for Men’s Health Magazine. Oh my. You can watch the video on my Arjun fan page. Scroll down a bit to the videos. Probably safe for work, except it will be blazingly obvious that you’re not working so wait till you get home or watch on your phone.

Leave your best whine in the comments.

P.S. I just put in tags for the post and there was already one for whining.

I have 7 more review copies of Free Fall available . . . I will gift an Amazon copy. If you need an ePub, let me know.

Demons and witches. You know you want to read and review this.

A century passes and I get a letter that says they didn’t get the statement under penalty of perjury. I thought about asking “WTF?” but decided it would be better to just type out the language from the form, sign it and resend it. Which I did.

Half a century passes…

Today I got two documents in the mail from the IRS. One was my certification that I am a US tax payer and the other was a letter informing me my additional documentation had not been received and if they didn’t get it pronto, they wouldn’t be able to provide my certification.

I’m glad they arrived on the same day.

Devonshire Cream is not readily available in the US, though you can certainly buy it. This yummy spread is especially good on freshly baked scones. It’s supposed to be easy to make so I went in search of recipes. My first attempt was an utter failure. All subsequent attempts have been a resounding success.

There are two methods, the oven method and the frying-pan method. The oven method is probably the least work, but technology may conspire against your success. Basically, what you do is heat the whipping cream in a covered oven-proof bowl at a very very low temperature for a long time. For the oven, you need 180 F, and some ovens, it seems, turn off after several hours of being on. You’re supposed to leave the oven on for 8-12 hours and then come along and scrape all the delicious Devonshire cream from the top.

In my case, I didn’t get the opportunity to find out if our oven would shut off because someone came along, ignored my note to leave the oven alone, and turned it off. Damn. But my whipped cream in that attempt was also only 18% fat. Total fail.

The frying pan method takes more attention, but it is less vulnerable to someone turning off the oven because the frying pan method looks like something is going on. Which it is. If you’re home for several hours anyway, this method works great.

Ingredients

• The very highest fat whipping cream you can find. Shoot for the high 20′s. Anything less will disappoint. Not the ultra-pasturized kind either. To find out the total fat content, check the nutrition label for fat contact percentage, saturated and unsaturated. Add them together and make sure you get a number in the high 20′s. The higher the better.

Hardware

• Big frying pan
• Heat diffuser (this thing you stuck UNDER the frying pan so it’s not sitting directly over the fire.)
• Slotted spoon
• Container for the cream you scrape off

Pour 1-2 pints of whipping cream in the frying pan. Put it on low over heat diffuser. Cover. Every hour or so scrape off the top layer with slotted spoon. The recipe I looked at said not to use a slotted spoon but that was a frustrating failure. Slotted spoon. Put the stuff into a container. Repeat until the cream is gone or you’re tired of it. Cover the stuff in the container and let rest in the fridge.

You’re done.

Anyway.

I am addicted to have the following apps on these devices:

• Kindle App – all devices
• HootSuite (Twitter app) on iPad3
• Seismic (twitter app on iMac)
• Twitter (on iPhone 4)

Here’s what’s started happening:

Me at my desktop working hard and taking DESERVED breaks for twitter: Someone has obviously said something funny, but seismic SUCKS at showing the conversation history. I grab the iPad and open up HootSuite, find the tweet and click “show conversation.” Ah, now I can tract back and find out who said the funny thing and decide if I want to pretend I was in on the funny thing all along.

Me on my iPad: I take a break from playing Quordy to see what’s happening on twitter. Oh, hey! There’s someone I want to follow and/or add to a list. I put down the iPad and go to seismic on the iMac because seismic makes it EASY to follow someone and add them to a list. Hootsuite not as much.

I’m on the MacBookPro and someone tweets about a great book. Woot! I pick up the iPad and use the Kindle store app to buy the book…

I’m somewhere away from the iMac and MacBook and don’t have the iPad with me (OMFG!) I pick up reading my book on the Kindle App.

Seriously. I have gadgets within reach with apps galore, and I switch between devices, sometimes without leaving my chair, ONLY because I want to do something that some other App does better on a different device.

Questions

1. Why can’t someone make a Twitter app that melds all the things people actually do so it’s all in just a click or swipe?

2. Did anyone foresee Apple being this evil? I didn’t. But now I’m an Apple gadget girl and it feels so good.

Uh Oh. A Rant

I also have a Kindle Fire. In my Kindle account, here’s my devices:

1. Kindle for iPad1
2. Kindle for iPad3
3. Kindle for iPhone
4. Kindle for Kindle Fire
5. Kindle for Mac (iMac)
6. Kindle for Mac 2 (MacBookPro)
7. Kindle Cloud Reader

Every single one is legally purchased. My son is currently using the original iPad. I read across devices.

Someone explain to me why publishers should limit the number of devices that a book can be read on.

Go read about Brenda and all that she does at the Riskies

Ingredients

• Fresh ginger (a big old hunk)
• Sugar (baker’s sugar works best but regular sugar is fine.)

Utensils

• Sauce pan (required)
• Long handled wooden spoon (required)
• Wire mesh sieve (if you want to easily save off the sugar, required)
• cooling rack (best if it’s fine enough to hold the ginger (nice to have)
• A tare scale is helpful but you can always fudge it.

Peel the ginger.

Chop it thinly and into pieces not too much bigger than your thumbnail or, say, smaller than a quarter.
Put the ginger in a sauce pan and just cover with water.

Bring to a boil then lower the heat to medium-ish and let it cook a while, stirring frequently. The original recipe I followed said to cook until it was transparent, but as it turns out, that takes forever unless you are a master chopper and able to chop really thin. I don’t think it’s necessary. Besides, the transparent part happens at a different stage. Basically you want to keep it at a low boil (more than a simmer) for at least 45+ min. I set my timer and come out and stir every 10 minutes.

In order to get a good amount of ginger water you can use for tea (see below), once or twice pour the water off into a suitable container. Add fresh water and continue slow boiling your ginger. Not too often though or your ginger and ginger water will be wimpy.

When it’s transparent or the finest slices are looking transparent, remove the ginger from the heat, save off the remaining water and weigh the ginger. If you don’t have a tare scale, then eyeball it.

Put the ginger back in the saucepan and measure out an amount of sugar equal to the weight of the ginger. (If the total weight of your ginger is 10 ounces, then measure out 10 ounces of sugar.) Or eyeball it. The margin of error appears to be pretty big, but err on the side of more sugar, not less.

Add 3 tablespoons (or so) of water to the ginger. (I know that doesn’t seem like much, but it is.) Pour in your sugar and return the ginger to high heat. Throw in more sugar if you’re worried or anxious for some reason.

Using a LONG wooden handled spoon, constantly stir the ginger. (Why? Because the mixture is HOT, that’s why. The longer handled the spoon, the further your hand is away from the heat.) The sugar and water will boil rapidly and look foamy. Keep stirring until the pan is dry. DO NOT STOP STIRRING OR WALK AWAY at any time while you’re doing this. It’s at this stage that the ginger becomes transparent.

Remove the ginger from the heat and pour the contents onto a fine wire rack with wax paper underneath, or just onto the waxed paper if you don’t have a finely wired rack (otherwise, all those small bits of ginger fall onto the waxed paper anyway.) Let it cool a bit. You can use the spoon to spread it out.

Put the ginger into a bowl with more sugar and toss to coat. When the ginger is completely dry, put the ginger in an air tight container (see below).

Saving the sugar

You will have left over sugar, some of it fine, some of it lumpy with tiny bits of ginger, all of it gingery.

Get another bowl or container. Pour your ginger into a sieve and shake. (See above, transfer the big pieces to your container.) You will have a bunch of fine ginger infused sugar which you can save and use.

Sieve the sugar from the waxed paper. You’ll have the clumpier sugar left, which you can store separately from the finer sugar.

Best hint

Use FRESH ginger.

Bonus Uses

Get a big glass of ice water. Put in fresh lemon juice to taste. Add some ginger sugar to taste (doesn’t take much!). Enjoy.

Put some of the ginger water, how much depends on how hot and gingery you like your tea. Fill the rest of the cup with boiling water. Enjoy.

Use the ginger sugar to flavor stuff. Like other tea. Or in your coffee.

[Character Name] is a strong, witty woman and the dialog is much better than most romances I have read.

When I read that, I don’t think, wow! let me get that book! I think, that’s a review by someone who doesn’t read enough romance to know what the hell she/he is talking about.

In other words, the reviewer doesn’t have a breadth of knowledge about the genre to convince me I should pay any attention to what she thinks of the book.

Anyway, because I’ve been working so hard (How hard? REALLY REALLY HARD) my brain shut off and I thought Book Spine Poetry was poetry you put on the spine of your books and I thought, whoa! I LOVE that idea. I will put poetry on the spine of my next POD book! And I tweeted, “I want that for my books!” and the next thing you know, there’s this on Twitter:

Is that awesome or what?

Mel the Rooster is Mean.

Websites have this ridiculous idea that making you provide answers to “security questions” actually provides security. Well, guess what? It doesn’t. Studies have amply demonstrated that most security question answers can be quickly guessed or found via information readily available via Google.

There’s another problem with them. Most of them are insanely stupid, vague or incapable of actually being answered in a way I’ll remember.

I have run across security “answers’ that are case sensitive and character sensitive.

Potato chips
Potato Chips
potato chips
potato chips.

Are all different answers. How the hell am I suppose to remember if I put in punctuation? Or where I might have used upper and lower case? It’s not a password where I get why I’m expected to remember upper and lower case as well as special characters.

And those family-related questions?

I don’t know where my parents met. My mother refuses to talk about much of her past. My father almost never does. Plus, they disagree on a LOT of their past history. I’ve also heard conflicting information about birth cities. I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!!!

Here’s some more questions:
Who was my favorite teacher? Well, actually, I can think of several. A year later, when someone insists on me answering that question, will I remember which favorite teacher I picked? No. I guarantee, out of the sea of security questions I’ve been forced to answer, I won’t remember what I told corporation X.

Who was my least favorite teacher? OH MY GOD. I have stricken them from my memory. Besides, least favorite teacher when? In elementary school? High School? College? Graduate School? Least favorite in what context? What if I answer that question and then later I remember a teacher I hated more? Fast forward one year. My brain is full of information that I use in my daily living. I have a vague recollection of being forced to provide such an answer but I remember even more the teacher I hated more. Which one did I say? Do I even remember the name of the second least favorite teacher? Plus, now the right answer is a LIE.

Then there’s this multi-answer scenario. I am not making this up.
1. What was your first car?

OK. I can answer that.

2. Of all the cars you have owned, which was your least favorite?

My least favorite was my first car. It was a piece of junk.

Your answers cannot be the same.

Great. So do I make up an answer? And if I do, how do I remember my made-up answer?

Then there’s questions like these:

What was your favorite job?

What?? Number one, I haven’t yet had my favorite job. I have had jobs that paid the bills and that I didn’t hate. But for each and every job, I always wanted to be doing something else, like being at home living off my lottery winnings. Plus, there’s no job that I loved everything about.  I’ve had jobs where I loved my co-workers but hated the work. Or hated my boss. Or jobs where I liked doing X and despised Y. I can’t answer a question like that, and if I just get frustrated and pick one, it won’t be a “true” answer and two years later I won’t remember what I put.

I have literally been on the phone with people being asked security answers I gave 5 years ago and I have NO idea what answer I gave. I cannot remember the PRECISE phrase, or whether I used my mother’s middle name or just her middle initial or none at all.

Security questions are stupid and they don’t even work.

Thank you for allowing me to get that off my chest. I feel better now.