I had the worst dream last night – I was visiting with friends and Maggie and Christopher left with all my stuff in their car: my purse, wallet, phone, keys. Actually, it was a motorcycle. Because of the fact situation of the dream there was no way to solve this problem so I decided I had to walk to their house.
 
“How far away is it?”
 
“Seventy miles.”
 
“Okay, can I borrow some shoes?”
 
Someone gave me vans and stockings.
 
I woke up completely panicked and it took forever to get back to sleep. Then I had to tell Bob all about it this morning. “All my phone numbers are in my phone. I didn’t have any money. There was nothing I could do.” Meanwhile Bob was cracking up: “A Pam control dream.”
 
I needed a few  cups of tea and some fruit and granola before I could function again.
 
I’m never going to let that happen.

I thought I killed my sourdough. After years of taking care of it, it got wedged in the back of the fridge and I neglected it. When I finally took it out it had a weird chemical smell and I dumped it.

Later I found out it was fine and with a couple of good feedings it would be good as new. Or good as old. You only have to throw it out if it gets mold or weird stuff growing in it.

When I was in California in February Auntie gave me some more starter and I fed it this weekend. I decided to bake a loaf of bread. I’ve done this a lot. I use the regular no-knead recipe and throw in a dollop of sourdough.

This time my sourdough feeding was more liquidy than I usually do. I fed the sourdough in my bread mixing bowl and I was too lazy to wash it. Honestly it occurred to me that this was a terrible idea as I was doing it but I did it anyway. I just scraped out most of the sourdough for the fridge and made the bread in the bowl with the remaining sourdough.

Within a few hours I had a bowl filled with bubbling “dough.” I left it overnight and in the morning tried to shape my loaf with what was actually a wonderful sourdough batter. When I took that baking class the teacher managed to make a loaf with really wet dough so I thought I could do it. But mostly I just swirled sticky batter all over my kitchen counter until I got mad and scraped it into the trash.

I’m sure when we get home tonight it will have taken over the trash can.

Cover by R. Toby Linwood (Wampanoag/Okanagan)

I’ve been talking about this forever, but FINALLY! My story collection is out into the world and available for eReaders.
 
It’s called: Red Tape Stories from Indian Country.

It’s a collection of nine speculative fiction stories including three that were already published. All the stories have some connection to the people and lands of the Karuk Tribe.

Here’s the Table of Contents and a little bit about the stories.

The Battle of Little Big Science
(previously appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction) This was my Clarion West week #3 story.

Estelle Makes the Casino Run
(previously appeared in Innsmouth Free Press) I wrote this for a contest with my Clarion West classmates.

Social Security
(previously appeared in The Wordstock Ten) This was my submission story for Clarion West.

Field Work
This was my Clarion West week #2 story. Are you seeing a theme here?

The Medicine Woman of Talking Rock
Yup, Clarion West Week #5.

Repercussions
Clarion West Week #6. This was me trying to do something different since you’re supposed to stretch yourself at the workshop.

Trusted Leader
This was my Week #7 story – the first thing I wrote after I left the workshop. The process was gruesome but I like the way it came out after about 5000 drafts.

Fish Killer
This story has nothing to do with Clarion West. I was upset about the dredge mining situation on the Klamath and needed to work it out.

The Casino Gargoyle
This was another submission story I wrote when I misunderstood the application instructions.

All of this can be yours with just a few clicks.

It’s available for Kindle at Amazon or in all other formats at Smashwords.

Special thanks goes to my Clarion West class and instructors. Also giant tower of thank you pies to Douglas Lucas for help with finalizing the manuscript and Eden Robins for the title. (Note to Douglas and Eden, that tower of thank you pies is a figure of speech. Don’t expect an actual tower of pies.)

We have a dorm fridge at the office. We keep a few Cokes and ginger ales in there. I drink maybe one a month. Co-worker probably fewer than that. It’s nice to have if you want one and if we have guests we have something to offer.

Not too long ago co-worker restocked the Coke and it seems like just a few weeks later it was down to one.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that I have little concept of the passage of time. Sometimes I’ll think of something as brand new and then realize we’ve had it for 3 years.

This week I mentioned to co-worker that we had only one Coke and maybe bring more in. I asked if he drinks Coke when I’m not around because I can’t remember the last time I saw him with one.

He said he thought I drank it all.

At first we thought the cleaning people must be drinking them but it didn’t make sense because if they were going to pilfer sodas, there are probably larger offices where it wouldn’t be so obvious. Plus they would be easy to bust and seems like a stupid way to lose your job.

Now we think maybe it was from when we had a group working on a project in the office and we just lost track.

Keep in mind we aren’t upset about this it was just funny that we both thought it was the other one.

I thought this story would be a lot more interesting when I started typing it but no time to come up with something better. I got to get this day started.

For a long time I clipped almost every brownie recipe I found. I was always on the lookout for a best recipe. I had the idea in my head that there was a giant range in brownie quality and if I was diligent enough, I would find the magical life-transforming recipe of brownie goodness.

Meanwhile I had a gooiest recipe, a most chocolately recipe, Katherine Heburn’s recipe, Test Kitchen Best Recipe, giant brownie bake-off winning recipes.
 
At one point I probably had at least a dozen recipes in my clippings, most of which I had never tried.
 
I finally went through and threw a bunch away because, I don’t make brownies that often (So why was I on the lookout for a life-transforming recipe? It’s a mystery.) and when I do I usually use this recipe (Thank you Keetha) which is always a big hit or else Mark Bittman’s.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that we had somehow accumulated 3 jars of Nutella and much as we love Nutella, it would take us awhile to work through 3 jars. So I got this brilliant idea to look for a Nutella brownie recipe.
 
I found this one which looks very simple and I was concerned it might turn out mediocre brownies but what the hell, just some butter and sugar and no shortage of Nutella.

They were amazing. They were so amazing I ate THREE! the night I made them and didn’t feel well when I went to bed.

My conclusion is that it’s pretty tough to bake a crappy brownie unless you make a mistake.

These are the tomato seedlings. I saved a blob of seeds last year and they’ve been sitting on the windowsill, looking like something we were too lazy to throw away, on a wadded up paper towel. I split them in half and planted the two blobs. A couple dozen sproutlets came up. I thinned them out. I need to get it to one per pot.

I finally flipped my closet over the weekend. I put the winter stuff away and pulled the lighter stuff from the back. I thought I needed more clothes. I was dreading having to buy any.

When the lotto was up to $300M or whatever I was thinking if I had money like that I’d hire people to bring me clothes. I would love to have new stuff I just don’t want to deal with having to out and get it myself.

I ended up finding a bunch of clothes I’d forgotten about that I put away last year. I probably could use a couple of tops and I might get a new pair of sandals because there’s a shoe store I like near the office.

Really what I need is winter clothes. There was a point in March where I was wearing my same warm outfits over and over. I can’t find good warm pants. I found an online store that had some that looked okay but when I looked at the reviews all the people who loved them were ladies 55-65. That didn’t sound promising.

But I don’t have to worry about it until October. Maybe then I’ll be in the mood for shopping.

So what’s the etiquette on talking about how people smell?

I’m sensitive to smells meaning that I notice them a lot, good or bad. And I tend to be one to blurt out, “Something smells good,” just about any time. I’m more reserved about bad smells, sometimes.

Recently the UPS man came to the office, and he smelled terrific.

I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would be weird. But he was like Scatman Crothers and he called me ‘Sweetheart’ so I don’t think he would have minded. We have 2 UPS men at the office. One of them never smiles, even when I make a joke. I would not say anything about smells around him.

News about the self-published eBook is coming shortly. I still need to get a few things checked out and then I want to set it up so you can get it for free for a few days. But it is all done and in the chute and *almost* ready for prime time.

Stay tuned.

Bob just did something completely ridiculous and then he asked me, “Honey, am I doing it wrong?”

I said, “Dude, you are a public service announcement for doing it wrong.”

I don’t think that other photo really captures how pretty it is so I tried again. This isn’t much better but it’s the best I can do with my cheapass cameras and my skill set.

We had amazing soul-transforming weather three days in a row over the weekend. We also had a soccer game and some visiting fans of the away team wrote about their visit to Portland. One of the things they commented on was how to them it was just a nice day in April but the locals were running around stoned out of their minds on heat and vitamin D.

It’s gray and raining again. Whew! That was enough open-toed shoes and not carrying around a raincoat for me.

I finally figured out what was going on with my iPod. Remember back in February I was on a road trip and it kept repeating the same song over and over? I don’t use my iPod every day and I forgot about it and every time I’d take it with me somewhere and it would be repeating over and over and I’d think, “Oh crap, I need to figure this out.”

I sat down with my iPod and my trusty search engine and immediately found a forum where someone said, “My iPod keeps repeating the same song over and over, what’s going on?”

And then, the amazingly helpful reply: “Sounds like you have it on repeat the same song over and over. Turn that off.”

No duh, Waldo. When I’m queen of the world that person is going to be banned from the Internet. I found several versions of this helpful information and had to dig around until I unearthed the secrets of where the repeat thingy was and even then it took me awhile of tapping on that tiny screen with my chubby man fingers to get the right menu to pop up. I can’t believe I managed to turn it on in the first place.

One problem, solved!

There’s always a new problem to take it’s place. The dishwasher died and the refrigerator is coughing and the bathtub is on slow-drain. At least the apple tree looks amazing. I don’t think it’s ever looked so pretty. I had enough time to prep the garden plot but not enough to actually plant anything. Supposedly the rain will take a rest this weekend and I can go crazy out there.