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Showing posts from January, 2014

Casino Royale this August

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Romance Writers of New Zealand have announced the schedule for the upcoming August conference August 14-17th, and there is a stellar group of authors taking part. I'm keen to hear indie superstar Marie Force especially and she's offering some great seminars during the weekend on topics such as author branding. Karina Bliss will be talking emotion, and James Scott Bell (I am reading "Plot and Structure" right now) will present the Friday workshop. Go to their website for more info.

Loving the iceberg

The iceberg lettuce that is. The lettuce that is so trashed these days. The lettuce that remains my fav, in spite of me growing attempting to grow other lettuces, red and green lettuces, in spite of buying bags of lettuces that someone else has grown and washed and packaged. I adore the iceberg. Back in the day a lettuce salad used to be a big bowl of chopped lettuce and tomato, grated carrot and cheese, maybe some chopped hardboiled egg mixed in there, some cucumber perhaps, in fact whatever you liked, with mayonnaise on the top. That is what my grandmother used to make. Then somehow, a lettuce salad became a pile of weeds. Some of them okay. Some actually quite vile. Now, I am not against the weeds. I quite like rocket, it's quite tasty, and I have actually been known to grow it. I think some of the types of lettuce you grow are quite good, especially those ones where you can go out and just pick a few leaves without having to dig up the whole thing. BUT. I really like iceberg l

HAPPY 2014

Happy 2014... in which I give thanks I made it to another year, and wasn't run over by a bus or anything. Which given my propensity to cross roads at inappropriate moments, and the fact that last year I did actually have a bit of an incident crossing a very busy road, is truly rather a miracle. 2014. My gosh! I was reminiscing with my sister how mother never thought she'd ever make it to the year 2000 because the millennium was just so huge to contemplate. YTK and all that. Back in the 1970s we thought we'd be running around in silver suits and flying to Mars every day. Amazing. I spent the New Year down country which was nice. Actually, no, it wasn't nice at all. It was a very stressful trip which involved seven hours in a car with rescued battery hens, a vehicle with no registration, no back indicators and no brake lights (seriously), and even worse, no radio or CD player so on the way back, sans poultry and other humans, I had to amuse myself singing. Quite tiring