Julia Slaughter

Archive for the ‘Random’ Category

I have a confession – I am a food blog junkie. I’ve never really got into reading blogs, in their infancy I would find someone interesting, read along for a while and then inevitably they would stop updating or they would go somewhere that I couldn’t follow and I would stop reading. I haven’t really paid much attention to this whole blogging thing since the late 1990′s, which is ironic I suppose since now I’m writing one.

I was first called back into blogs by some of my favorite authors – George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman offered a unique window into their world and their lives through their blogs. (Even though GRRM maintains that his is NOT a blog.) I look forward to Neil Gaiman’s updates on his beehives with genuine interest. I admit that sometimes George RR Martin dips into politics which I find rather dull, I do like hearing about his travels with his wife and following along with one of my favorite series.

I don’t remember how it happened but one day I stumbled across a food blog and I felt like I had found buried treasure. I liked seeing real pictures of food that people had cooked, not super beautiful glamor shots that make me feel inadequate when my food doesn’t look like the picture in the book. I liked real recipes that acknowledge that perhaps after a full day at work I might need a recipe that can be prepared in under an hour.

Many food blogs are all linked together and so from that first blog, I went on to another site, and then another. I loved seeing what different people were cooking, and I was fascinated when I found food blogs written by people from other ethnic backgrounds. They use exotic ingredients I’ve never heard of but the bowls of shimmery green soup are intriguing.

I suppose it was a natural evolution for me to start reading food blogs, I’ve fallen in love with Ruth Reichl’s books about food. I love that she tells you something touching and personal and then punctuates those stories with recipes from her personal kitchen. My mouth waters at the way she describes food – it’s wonderful. She really made me start paying attention to what I was eating, not just how it tasted but the textures and the experience of what I was easting.

I’d like to tell you that at some point in time I’d venture to share my recipes and pictures of my concoctions here with you, but the truth is – that’s not really the way I cook. I usually start with a base recipe and then I twist it around until I’m no longer even bothering to measure anymore. I could never tell anyone how to make my Crawfish Pie, I merely get into the kitchen and make it, I need someone else to follow behind me and write down what I pick up and put in there.

Now that I’ve started this it’s really got me thinking…I wonder what’s for dinner?

In high school I was a prolific writer,I wrote two novel length works that were passed around by my friends. I also wrote countless poems, short stories, etc. I mention this because I felt like in high school I was completely and totally focused on the task at hand – writing. So imagine my surprise when I reconnected with an old friend from high school and I told her she was never going to believe this but I had grown up to be a computer geek. Her response is that she easily believed it. Ouch, I guess I wasn’t as focused as I thought. I mention this because lately my “day job” has been rather time consuming and it’s computer geek related.

For more than a year we have been preparing for an inevitable upgrade, there have been countless conference calls, meetings, and mass emails flying back and forth. The upgrade is made more difficult by the fact that the machine we’re upgrading is a main frame, not a regular PC. When I maintained a Window’s network most of my software upgrades took an hour, maybe two, and that usually included prep time. So today should’ve been the beginning of the down slide, the bulk of the project behind us, (We expected some user hysteria, but that’s all perfectly normal.) but the bulk of the work should’ve been behind us. Did you notice the use of the phrase “should’ve,” well the upgrade didn’t go through as planned and so now everything is in limbo. The upgrade is kind of like a hurricane brewing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s going to make landfall and ruin my weekend eventually the question is when.

At times like this the desire to flee my “day job” is almost overwhelming. I would much rather focus my energy on writing, but when projects like this hang over my head it’s hard to concentrate on anything but that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing other things – watching True Blood, reading what other people are writing, but I just can’t lose myself in my own story the way I wish I could. (Frankly, I’m proud of myself that I’ve been able to keep my once a week blogging thing going.)

Anyway, let us pray that the Upgrade will make landfall soon so that I can weather the storm and get back to doing what I love to do.

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
~Jane Austen

I think my blogging often comes undone because I feel like I don’t have anything terribly exciting to share, life is busy and yet uneventful. I’ve always loved that Jane Austen quote because I think it sums it up perfectly. I know you can’t always have Comic-Con type events, and I can’t say that my life is boring, but it’s just stuff that I’m not sure is of interest to anyone else necessarily.

I was very proud when I left for Comic-Con that the house was in order. I like to come home and have everything in its place, I feel like the mess you bring home with you is enough. After my heroic efforts to have everything tidy, imagine my irritation to come home and discover that in my abscence the refrigerator had languished away leaving behind an assortment of questionable contents. My motto was “when in doubt, throw it out” leaving behind an odd assortment, mostly of condiments. The death of the refigerator has brought in an added element of drama since, of course, the repair man “got in the wrong part” so the process that was supposed to be resolved last Wednesday lingers on today. (I don’t think I’ve ever had the right part come in the first time when a major home appliance fails.)

I jumped straight from vacation into a buzz of month end activities at work. My work life is married to the accounting fiscal year, which means that as you get closer to month end life is chaotic. The chaotic period before the end of the month lasts longer as you get closer to fiscal year end, when it reaches a fevered pitch that lasts for almost the whole month. For me the good news is that our fiscal year ends in September so the holidays are not completely ruined by the stress of year end activities. The downside is that when the “day job” gets crazy, the time I get to spend on my writing, any and all writing, seems to go down. (I blame it on the face that I end up going home and engaging in mindless entertainment as much as possible.) Its this time of year that makes me wish more than anything that I could devote myself to my writing full time, I just hate having to have what I love eclipsed but what I have to do to live.

Other busy nothings that barely seem like they would hold a glimmer of interest for anyone else – dinner with friends, dogs escaping and going visiting one morning, a neighbor’s dog deciding to come visit for dinner and then subsequently trying to find out who his family was, I contemplated some yard work but decided against it as it was hot.

Life, as always, keeps moving and for the time being it seems to be dancing to the wild beat of month end activities but hopefully something more than a busy nothing will happen so I can bring it here to share with you.

I suppose the 16th of July seems like kind of a random time to start a new blog, but next week I’m going to San Diego for Comic Con so I hope that I will have interesting tales to share and pictures to post.

This is my third year at Comic Con and I am really looking forward to it. The first year was pretty much complete and utter chaos, last year was a little better,  but this year not only do I have a better handle on how the programming works I have friends I’m looking forward to getting together with,  some of them that I’ll be meeting in person for the first time! Thanks to World of Warcraft I’ve made friends all over the country,  and fortunately some of them are going to Comic Con.

I have to admit that aside from the crowds and the higher cost of living,  I like San Diego and I love Comic Con.  The weather is beautiful, especially when leaving behind this humid, sticky 100+ temp weather that we’re having here on the Gulf Coast.  I was trying to explain to my Mom why I like Comic Con so much, and really it’s the people. Everyone is so friendly, even when they play Horde and you play Alliance. There is sometimes teasing, but it’s usually all pretty good natured.

So with a trip on the horizon it seems like a good time to embark on a new blog, hopefully I can find something worthwhile to say.