July 1, 2009
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When I was in the fourth grade, my reading book had two science fiction stories — “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury and “The Fun They Had” by Issac Asimov.
I’ve been thinking about the first story quite a bit lately, as it’s been raining so much. I’m beginning to feel like the protagonist, who is slowly going crazy because of the rain.
But these two stories also trigger a thought. How many people got into science fiction because of stories they read in school? Probably few people older than I am, as the genre was considered beneath contempt by many educators before I started going to school. In Stranger in a Strange Land, there’s this throw-away line about a character having read War of the Worlds in school, “same as everybody”. When the book was first published, I am sure it was meant to be a least a little absurd. And yet, my fifth grade teacher, who read aloud to the class quite a bit, read A Wrinkle in Time to the class. When I was in 10th grade, I was actually able to take a whole unit in spec-fic. We read Dune, and A Canticle for Leibowitz (Hey, it was still the Cold War). I’m trying to remember others, but I can’t.
If you’re over 35 or so, did you ever encounter science fiction as part of your school curriculum?
June 24, 2009
bento
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I was going over some prices trying to decide if bento are really cheaper than bringing a more standard lunch. It will quickly become obvious that a bento is much cheaper than going out for lunch, even getting fast food!
After talking with a friend of mine and doing some research for a class I want to do, I sat down with some of my old receipts and started pricing out bento I have actually made. The prices involve the food alone. I don’t count the cost of plates for dinner and if you’re buying hundreds of dollars in bento equipment, you have no-one but yourself to blame. My stash cost a LOT less than that. Just sayin’.
So, on to the food. A really cheap bento might cost me a buck. I only did that once, and it wasn’t as balanced as I like. The most expensive one I’ve actually made cost $1.76, and was using some pre-packaged food. The average amount I usually spend on food for a bento is somewhere around $1.25. While it’s not at the dollar a meal food stamp level, I’m fortunate enough not to have to go there right now. I consider spending a buck and a quarter on a meal completely acceptable. I was not necessarily going for the cheapest meal I could make in making these things, but just buying meat cheaply and not sweating anything otherwise.
It’s cheaper than a school lunch ($2.35 at my son’s school).
So what about the classic fruit and a sandwich?
It depends. Right now, a bananna and peanut butter sandwhich is pricing out at about $0.73. More expensive fruit, and a sandwich with lunch meat and veggies is going to run you closer to $1.75. That’s still hardly bank-breaking, though close to my most expensive bento. For an entire working month, that bento is going to come out as ten dollars cheaper, if you’re bringing the apple and lunch meat sandwich with veggies. Start throwing in chips and the price goes up a little. I have no idea what chips cost. I don’t buy them.
Leftovers?
That’s also going to depend on what you usually eat. For my household, it would be comperable to my usual bento.
If you’re buying lunch, you’re probably spending at least five dollars a day doing it. So, the takeaway here is that bringing your lunch is astronomically cheaper. Bento is just a fairly frugal hobby if you do it right.
June 18, 2009
bento
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I’m a Bad Mama. The stuff in the top tier are some sort of pseudo-food pizza pocket thingies you make in the toaster oven.
However, since my son just completed the best school year of his life, topping it off with the best report card he’s ever gotten, I think he can have a pizza pocket lunch for his last day at school, don’t you?
Many of us in the bento maker community do get a bit self-congratulatory about our healthy lunches. To be honest, a desire to eat healthily is a driving factor for many people who make bento in the US. It doesn’t have to be. You can put M&Ms in a bento (and I just realized I’m going to have to repack this lunch, as I’d promised my son a Lindt truffle in his lunch for tomorrow), you can put in fried processed food. You can put anything into a bento.
But that’s the real beauty of bento making — its flexibility. Sure, sure, for the most part people who make ‘em try to give some attention to making sure that there are lots of colors in the veggies (ensuring a good nutritional variety), and generally don’t use a lot of pre-packaged stuff. But you really could cut up a twinkie, and arrange it sushi-like in one of the tiers if your heart so desired.
In fact, I would totally make these Twinkie sushi as a snack bento if it were something Really Special, like a long trip, or… say trying to convert my little nephews to the joy of bento so they’ll whine for them and drive my brother crazy.
Though with my luck, and knowing my seafood-loving little bro, they’re already into the real thing.
June 13, 2009
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My household, when we moved to our present home, did not own a lawnmower. The man of the house, who claimed the job of mowing the lawn as his, decided he wanted a push reel mower. Me?
I figured this fell under the role of Designated Control Freak (or DCF). He wanted to be The Mower of the Lawn, he could get whatever he wanted to accomplish the job. It seemed a bit goofy to me, but since it wasn’t my problem, I didn’t figure I needed a say.
Well, it was a few years before I used it. You see, it took that long before the lawn got too high for me to want to tolerate, so of course that made me the lawn DCF. (The usual lawn DCF being in the throes of an insanely busy work schedule). I hauled it out without much enthusiasm, but with great curiosity, as I’d never tried it before. Since it was a gadget rather than a big, indimidating noisy machine like the snow blower, I figured it was worth a go.
I found out something. Push reel mowers are fun! They do make a low-level rattling noise, and there is an art to keeping the blades spinning to get the appropriate cut, but they’re more fun than the gas thing I occasionally used as a kid. (My theory is that like the man of the house here, my father liked mowing the lawn, so I was rarely asked to do it).
We got one mostly because they’re cheap to buy, they don’t use gas, so they’re cheap to use, and they’re not noisy. While yes yes yes, they’re pretty environmentally sound, the choice was more about saving money than saving the environment. Though as I often maintain, conservation and such is often the more economical way to go.
June 6, 2009
fitness
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I was called athletic today.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love being called that. Tickles the hell out of me. But I really don’t see myself that way. Yeah, yeah, I know, what else does being an athlete require but spending some time on a sport on a regular basis?
I’ve mused on this before, but I still haven’t internalized the idea that I wanted to — that being an athlete merely requires something physical you love and do on a relatively frequent basis. I mean, I just swam over a mile today!
Am I a great athlete? No. Am I even a fast swimmer? Hell, no!
I think part of it is that I do sometimes slog through a swim. Goodness knows I did today. I was constantly telling myself, “C’mon. You decided to put in a 2,000 today. Just keep doing it. You’ve got one more length in you.” This was not one of those glorious swims where I feel like a god. (Though I like those a lot better).
Now, a lot of why I’m doing the 50 mile swim is because I’ll get a t-shirt at the end of it that I intend to wear when I’m working the front desk at the gym. So very often women built like me are scared to come to the gym. They’re scared their goals won’t be listened to. They’re scared of being judged. The gym I go to is about getting moving on a regular basis and not about getting down to 12% body fat, but there are gyms that feel otherwise about it, and goodness knows that can put someone off.
Although maybe I’ll be taking away hope when I prove that exercise doesn’t automagically make you skinny. Who knows?
June 5, 2009
Uncategorized, fitness
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I got called a fish today. I was absurdly pleased. What was cool about it to me was that it was by someone who has decided to train for a triathlon. For those of you who’ve done a tri, we’re definitely talking Clydesdale1 here.
The guy is not particularly a skilled swimmer, but I’ve seen him swim and have seen him move on dryland. He’s got good body control, so I don’t think it’s going to take too long for him to relax enough for him to get his form down. What pleased me so was that this muscular, athletic man tried my sport, has seen me perform, and respects what I do. In truth, he’ll soon outpace me. I been swimming seriously for about three years, and consider it a great swim if I can do 2,000 in under 50 minutes. He’s already doing a 1,000 in half an hour, just a few weeks into training. Though I did make a snarky crack that I was not going to let him beat me swimming, he’s gonna get a lot faster than ever I can.
It means a lot to me as a heavy woman to be respected for athletic stuff, especially when it’s not framed in terms of what it makes me look like, but performance.
1This is a category for men over 200 lbs. They may be fat, or just big, heavy and muscular. This guy is big, heavy and muscular, and truly rather reminiscent of a draft horse in power. The female equivalent is called an Athena. I think the weight cutoff is something like 145.
May 28, 2009
fitness
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I swam a 2000 today. That is by no means a normal swim, though I suspect by the end of the summer that it will be. Right now, a good solid 1500 is my normal workout. A 2000 takes me about 50 minutes and I don’t always have that much time. No, I am not a fast swimmer by any stretch of the imagination!
So, that’s 20,000 yards since May 1. I want to see if I can possibly get in another 5,000 by May 31, so that I can be properly on track to get to my goal on time without scrambling too much. I have until Aug 31, so ideally I need to put in 25,000 yards a month. That’s a good, steady pace. Not insane, but there’s little room for slacking.
That’s a lot more yardage than I’ve ever swum in a month.
This is doing a good job of keeping me focused on working out. You pretty much have to keep working at a pretty steady pace or you won’t make it. Oh sure, there are already people who have racked up something like 35,000 yards. They’re competitive swimmers and hats off to ‘em.
I found out an aqua aerobics class only counts as 500 yards. I think they’re getting the short end of the stick. Those classes are an hour long! I’ll grant you probably don’t go quite as hard as I do, but… Well, if aqua aerobics is what you’re doing, either your fitness levels aren’t quite at the lap swimming range, your technique isn’t up to it, or you’ve got a disability where there’s Just No Way. I wouldn’t begrudge an hour class counting as 2000 yards if it’s getting butts in the pool. Doing what you can is important. I mean, there’s a reason I’m a swimmer and not a runner!
I’m all mellow and relaxed and sleepy after my swim. I may nap. I may just veg. But goodness me, it’s nice to have work done, have worked out and have a free afternoon. I don’t get this often, but I sure like it.
May 25, 2009
rant
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I’m a big fan of Terry Pratchett, and today marks a big day in fandom for Pratchett fans — The Glorious 25th of May. I’ll try to keep out too many spoilers for those of you who want to read Night Watch but haven’t.
Now, as an American, how could I have the gall to celebrate that on today, of all days, Memorial Day?
(You Pratchett fans were there. This is for people who weren’t).
The Glorious 25th of May is a day of rememberence — not for great and glorious heroes, but for little men who weren’t anything special. They were losers; they were mostly craven and misfits.
But they did the job that was in front of them. They didn’t do it for glory, reward or anything, but simply did the patient and unassuming duty they’d shouldered.
Friends, ultimately that’s what heroism really is — doing the job that’s in front of you.
Another of my favorite writers talks about this:
“She didn’t give up, Ben; she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She’s a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She’s a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She’s a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.” — Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein.
On Memorial Day, I don’t think of flags and bugles and glorious charges with great battle cries. Sure, such things can wring tears from my eyes in a movie, but it’s not the important part and it’s not what I think of when I think of this day. I think of everyone who patiently does the job that’s in front of him or her — and God knows our military is full of them.
And I do appriciate it that you were there.
May 6, 2009
Work From Home Course
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When you set your office hours, decide what’s work and what’s not. Please, for the love of Ceiling Cat, don’t limit what you consider work to paying contracts and marketing. I know it sounds weird. But look at the policies of some successful companies who encourage their employees to take a certain percentage of their time to develop a project that just takes their fancy. (Google leaps to mind. Gmail and several other Google applications are a result of this policy). You want to make sure that you “count” time to be creative, to brainstorm, to experiment, get messy and make mistakes. Just be careful not to fool yourself about what those projects are. For instance, this book is one of those projects for me. It counts as work. If I’ve finished what I intend to do on paying contracts, have finished answering my quota of RFPs and have done my bookkeeping, this is what I work on during my office hours.
So, how do you decide what’s “real” work and what’s screwing around? Ultimately, you’re going to have to make a choice. Sex blogs? That’s a no-brainer, right? Well, I know of one entrepreneur for whom sex blogs would most certainly be time well-spent professionally! What it boils down to is, “Is this really in my field?”
I’m a writer who will work on some of the most amazing ranges of things, so this can get fuzzy. I’ve written on everything from Red Pandas to how to flirt. I may be called upon to write about almost anything at almost any time. So, does surfing Wikipedia count?
For me, no. While my ‘Satible Curtiosity is a boon to professional development, I’ve chosen not to allow surfing for information randomly during office hours. Oh, I have a ball with it afterwards (under the “learn how to learn” principle). If I can’t envision a “product” for it within an hour or two, it’s screwing around rather than working. Does this mean I might turn rants, irritations, debates and curiosities into actual useful material? Well, where do you think this course came from?
Depending on your field, you may find that you spend less professional time than you intended on directly paying contracts. For me? I spend an average of 45% of my working day on directly-paying material. That’s pretty much par for the course in my field. If it drops below that, I know my sales and marketing needs work. If it goes above 60%, I need to re-assess how many contracts I’m accepting. That sounds really cool and all, but it’s actually a lot more stressful than not enough work. You won’t believe me until it happens to you, but trust me, it’s true.
This isn’t something you can look at as a daily, or even weekly thing. I’m talking month to month. There are weeks when I have bugger all to do for a client, then weeks where I spend all my office hours on directly-paying material. While you really ought to keep track from day to day, you don’t want your evaluation granularity to be smaller than a month.
This does help you set your rates, though. My bills are such that I have to bring in at least what I did as an administrative assistant. But only about half of the hours I spend working directly pay for that. However, I charge more than twice per hour what I earned as an admin, even though I bid by the job, so it’s not necessarily immediately obvious to a client. Yes, I’ll be giving a good hourly rate formula to you in a later lesson.
While routine is good, and it’s a good idea to make it work for you, Life Happens. Kids get sick, spouses change work schedules so that alone time you thought you had is no more. You’ll want to make sure that whatever you do, you don’t get so wedded to your routine or work ritual that when that ritual can’t happen, you can’t work.
This is another one of those “speaking from experience” moments. When I was working on my first novel, I was living in Virginia with my husband. I had a word count goal for each week day. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment and my desk was in the living room back to back with his drafting table. My ritual was to get up, have my mug of espresso, and write all morning until I’d hit my word count. I would dread “workdays” that he’d take off, or wouldn’t go in because of snow.[1] I couldn’t get anything done. His very presence was a distraction.
Don’t do this to yourself. If you’re going to make a living, especially doing creative work, the last thing you can afford to indulge in is artistic temperament. If you can train yourself to be able to work under a variety of conditions, it’s a good idea.
I really do, no kidding, write when I’m traveling. In fact, before I started work on this paragraph, I was working on a formatting job for a client – all while riding on a passenger train to visit a friend[2].
Why should you do this? Well, for one, you don’t want to develop an artistic temperament, even if you are an artist. Two, you’re going to be working your rear off. You’re not going to be getting paid vacations, so it’s better to accept that, and learn to work during dead time like travel time, or under unusual circumstances. Otherwise, you’ll be chained to your house, or you need to raise your hourly rate to save for vacations.
Setting goals is really important to being self-employed. You’ll need it at first to start getting the contracts, and then to complete them. You’ll need the goals to have some direction, especially in the beginning when you aren’t bringing in a lot of cash. You’ll need them as you go along to make sure that you’re making appropriate use of your best commodity — your time and brain.
Setting yearly and monthly goals are a good way to help you plan your daily goals. In fact, I’d say that the daily to-do list without a general idea of what you want to accomplish over time is foolish. While there is a certain level of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks in this gig, you don’t want to be too scattered!
This was my goal list for October 2007
- Prep to teach a kick-ass class in MS Word
- Get three new clients
- Make my word count every day on Stoneflower (A novel I was writing)
- Find one more project or sideline that could bring in $400 in a month.
- (non-income generating) Keep up on my Poly writing. I might go ahead and do a quarterly ‘zine, but I’m going to play that for a break-even thing and do it for fun. Can’t everything be about money, nor do I want it to be.
This led to a to-do list for a day early in October 2007:
- Write 500 Words on Stoneflower
- Have meeting with neighbor across the street to help her make a Spanish class brochure (I count this as client work because I’ll be getting about $200 worth of Spanish lessons for my son).
- Bid on one project on iFreelance
- Brainstorm 10 short story ideas for writing contest due Dec 3.
- Do a brainstorm on the Polyamory ‘Zine to speculate format, how often it will be released, costs to make/send out, etc.
- Bid on an eLance project
- Brainstorm some topics for the Polyamorous Misanthrope column that will include more than a one-line topic.
- Spend an hour brainstorming things that I think I can do that will bring in $100/week.
- Study the MS Word manuals for the class I am teaching
Now interestingly enough, not everything panned out. You know what? Everything won’t. That’s okay. You want to try lots of different things. Stoneflower is only about 65,000 words long so far and far from done, though it’s properly plotted, I never did do the poly ‘Zine, I didn’t win the writing contest, and the woman who was going to teach the Spanish lessons never did get back to me.
And yet, I am still in business. Those daily bids on the freelance boards did pan out eventually, but even that took time.
The important part is that you’re consistently thinking about ways to bring in business, how to refine your business, what new products and/or services you might want to offer, and what works for you. Your list won’t be the same as mine, as your goals and abilities are different. That’s perfectly all right! What is important is that you’re in a stage of constant refinement with it.
[1] This was Virginia. Virginians tend not to go out in the snow, and no wonder. It’s amazing the difference a plow, some sand and good snow removal makes!
[2] It would be a rare trip, indeed, that I could not use the time as enough working hours to pay for the trip!
May 5, 2009
bento
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A bento made with whatever I could scrounge in the kitchen
To make a point, I wanted to make a bento that:
A) Did not use a specialty bento box.
B) Only used what I had on hand in the house and,
C) Did not use any specialty bento-making equipment.
So, basically, I tried to make a bento based on what one can reasonably find in a kitchen. Cookie cutters that I’d owned 15 years were arbitrarily deemed okay, but vegetable cutters bought for bento purposes were not. I decided that I wouldn’t even use an Onigiri mold.
The container is a 2C (550ml to those of you across the Pond) flat Rubbermaid container that I think was meant to be a sandwich container. This is more or less a standard volume for any Japanese bento you’ll buy.
As it happened, I did not use any sort of cutters. This was an interesting challenge, because I’m getting low on veggies and fruits, and I wanted to make it out of stuff I ordinarily had in the house. I decided that for the sake of the experiment, I would not go grocery shopping for anything, but use what I had in the kitchen. I really frowned over how to make the fishies when I realized that giving the impression of fishie was plenty. Detail wasn’t important, only impression and contrast.
So, the rice is regular rice only with blue food coloring added to the water while cooking. It tastes like rice. The fishies are grape tomatoes. The seaweed is lettuce, the rocks are stir-fried chicken breast and the orange things that I don’t know what they should represent are carrots. I added some chopped cucumber for a little more green.
This is also a million times fancier than anything I ordinarily do and was still a bit off-the-cuff. I’ve seen seascapes that would blow your mind. It’s just that I didn’t want to spend more than 20 minutes on it, so this is what I did. But notice that with a small time investment, you can make some incredibly cute bento without spending extra money on all the “cute” stuff. The container was a flipping 2 cup sandwich style container, for heaven’s sake!
The Furoshiki is a bandana I had lying around from the last CampCon
Notice that I didn’t use anything special for the wrap, either. It’s just a bandana I had lying around, as well as the chopsticks I’ve had since forevah.
I commented I didn’t use any specialty bento gear and my son gave me an odd look and said, “I thought your bento gear was your brain.”
Why yes, I am proud of my son! Even if he didn’t want this bento for his school lunch.
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