Cyber Monday

Like Fairies, Bogeymen and a margarine that actually tastes like butter I have troubles believing in Cyber Monday.

Back in the early exploration days of the web perhaps there were a handful of the super nerds living inside their giant jars with electrodes hooked to their brains navigating the five online shops to purchase gifts after coming up empty on the Black Friday weekend.

But now stores start their on-line madness the week of Thanksgiving. Who hasn't been watching the Amazon scroll, particularly when you grow tired of your relatives and need something, anything to keep you away from the knives.

In the spirit of Cyber Monday and its little cyber week I decided to put aside my doubt and spend the week or so highlighting some of the neat small business stuff on the web that I'll happily vouch for. Parking is such a bitch on-line.

To begin I decided to show off the billions of things I have stashed around the internet for sale in various forms or another:

First there's my paintings, okay there are very few of my paintings actually. They've become a bit rarer over the year as I've been busy with other things keeping me far from brush.

You can spot more at my Etsy store here.

If; however, you had an eye on one of my old paintings but would like a fancy print you can find some here of some of my more favorite trees and things:

I have all manner of bits, bobbles, t-shirts, mugs, mousepads, and bric-a-brac candy for sale in my zazzle store. It's having one of those if you click here you can get 50% off ipad case type sales going on all week:

If you dig through a bit there are a bunch of Rifftrax inspired things towards the back and speaking of Rifftrax, my husband and I have some shorts for sale as well. (I told you this was going to take a while).

I suppose it's best to end on that book thingie I spent last year struggling through. You can get it in Kindle, Nook, Paperback, and scrawled across your bedroom walls.

Well I think that's pretty much it, you know for the sake of this post let's say it is it (shoves three headed barter monster back into the closet).

Happy Clicking!

Green Bean Casserole not from a can

Happy almost Thanksgiving everyone!

So far thing are looking okay, and I don't believe we shall see a repeat of last year where due to illness on the other end my husband and I had 3 hours to prepare a Thanksgiving feast on our own.

Boy that was a lot of fun, shopping at 7:30 on Thanksgiving to pick up what for everyone else would be last minute things and for us was well everything. Fast brining turkey bits, whipping up two sides in the same oven, keeping them warm and then roasting the turkey. Yup, grand ol' time.

But sometimes I like to enjoy the festive holiday season for as long as I can and occasionally one just wants green bean casserole. Except I'm not crazy about the traditional get a frozen bag of beans, a can of soup and the always necessary fried onion strips. It's sort of well quintessential 1950's fair with the flavors muddied under heavy amounts of sodium.

So I was extra excited to find a from scratch green bean casserole recipe, I did alter it a bit because I have a terrible habit of doing that.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon oil
• About 1/4 cup of dried onions
• 8 ounces mushrooms, chopped
• 1 tablespoon onion powder
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt, divided
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour, divided
• 1 cup milk
• 3 tablespoons dry sherry,(or in my case the cooking wine)
• As many fresh green beans I could rescue from the rotting bag
• 1/3 cup reduced-fat sour cream

First thing I did was prep the fresh green beans. Frozen's always a good option to, it's just our local grocery store always has a bag of fresh that I like to get. So I slice and dice a lot and plop they go into the water.

To a pan add the oil and onions. You can be a normal person and actually slice up an onion or be me and despise the thing aside from a handful of forms. Let those get flavorful and then add the mushrooms and spices. Cook them for about 5-7 minutes to escape the tasty juices and mix together flavors.

I should warn you since we are using thyme it will smell like Thanksgiving in your pan, so use caution and try to avoid any turkeys with a grudge. Once those are looking nice and dessicated sprinkle the flour over the veggies and add the milk and sherry. Bring that to a simmer for a few minutes to thicken up (and oh will it). This is a good time to taste and adjust your flavors accordingly (I probably added more thyme here).

Now plop in the green beans and the sour cream. Stir and stir until you have this ooey gooeyness:

Now here is where I go completely off the recipe, because half the point of making green bean casserole is the french's fried onions. It's really a vehicle for eating them without having to do it huddled over the kitchen sink at 4 AM.

So instead of making their fancy topping I tossed a few of the pre-bought stuff (oh the horrors) into the pan and then added the entire green bean goo into a dish and topped with more fried onions:

Into the 400 oven for 15 minutes to come out looking like this:

And how does it taste? Both warm and familiar but with a bit more pop, you can really get a good feel for the mushrooms instead of the vague idea a mushroom was near it from a can. Its also a lot more filling than the usual can stuff. I was a bit low on the beans so I came nowhere close to filling my dish but there's still quite a bit for leftovers.

It's a lot more work but I say it's worth it for the homemade green bean casserole.

Doggie wardrobe

I'm still doing that chasing butterflies thing but I thought we could all use a picture of a dog in pajamas.

Silly Essie is built like a supermodel, tiny chest and insanely long so either her clothes are super baggy and sometimes catch her back feet or well look like that.

Either way yes I know I have a dog that loves clothes, it's downright disturbing how excited she gets when I pull out a sweater or set of pajamas. We mostly indulge her because it keeps her sleeping longer and we'll do anything to get a break from the psychopath in black fur.

Awareness Aware Month

My brain's still churning out indecipherable words at about 3,000 or so a day but every now and then it needs a nice break.

Writing a first draft is like trying to catch butterflies in a hurricane. You lopsidedly pin down what you can before the other words flee.

So I needed a little creativity change of pace and created my first Post Secret:

On the other side of someone said something and then for made me do it, my husband in talking about how October is pink boobies month wondered if there was a Death Awareness month. Thus was this poster conceived, gestated and born in my head (I have no idea how Zeus did it, I'm still craving pickled cauliflower).

Now back to the text mines.

Finished! Well, kinda

Perhaps the most addictive part of NaNoWriMo for me are the stats. I can get rather competitive but only with myself (or against computer controlled shoes that try to screw you over during Monopoly).

Just look at all this tasty tasty data:

There's a line chart, tracking how much you accomplished in a day, how far you have to go, and more than likely when you will finish.

As you can see I passed the 50,000 mark sometime yesterday. Alas it wasn't as exciting as the first time when Neil Gaiman responded to one of my little brain goo tweet as I was limping across the finish line. (Though I still jump up and down in little circles whenever I remember that he actually liked those posters I whipped up *bounce* *bounce* *bounce*).

But my point, right right, the point is that way back on day one or two as I'd upload my daily gains the little you will be finished on box intoned I would be done by November 17th. Sure, I laughed and angels will fly out of my dog's butt (in retrospect that is a bit more likely considering the weird crap she eats).

And yet, there I clickity clacked away and looked up to find 50,000 words (and a good 1/3 of the story left to go) ruminating on my hard drive on yes the seventeenth. It's rather eerie really, I wonder what else the magical line chart/bar graph can predict.

*When will I die?* *When will I eat a Reuben sandwich?* *Will the Reuben kill me?*

Ask later? The 8 ball got to you didn't it?

Obligatory celebration graphic and now I'm off to keep writing, this thing will get finished even if I have to drag wild horses to a bar and make them be the designated drivers!