Today is Danica’s birthday.

It’s not just any birthday though, today my little girl turns thirteen. Thriteen. Wow. So now I’m officially the mother of a teenager. And not just any teenager, a freaking awesome one.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure to meet Dani, let me tell you a little bit about her. Danica is clever, funny and creative. She loves rice, ice cream and tofu and up until recently wouldn’t eat a green vegetable without a significant amount of coercion. She’s a huge fan of horror movies (her favourite movie when she was 3 was Interview With a Vampire), enjoys singing, drawing and hanging out with her family. The most remarkable thing about Danica, however, is the size of her heart.

Last year at the end of the year her teacher passed out personalised presents to all the kids in her class. On each of them she’d chosen one word she thought applied to that particular person. On Danica’s she’d written “Benevolent” and I think she hit the nail on the head. Danica has got the biggest, kindest heart of anyone I’ve ever met.

I love her to pieces and I’m so very proud to be her mother, and honored to have been able to watch and help guide her as she grew up to become the wonderful young lady she is today. The teenage years are challenging ones, there is no denying it, but they are also exciting and full of potential. I have no doubt Danica will navigate through them with style and grace and continue to make me more proud than I could ever express.

I love you Goober, happy birthday!

Ever since Dani was very, very small we’ve baked together. At first she was actually so little she couldn’t sit up in her highchair without help and I’d have to tuck towels in around her to keep her upright, so she was just sort of watching what was going on. Now, she is more often than not to be the one in charge of the baking with me acting as supervisor and sometime assistant. It’s a happy coincidence then that my friend Beth is asking her friends to share some of their favourite recipes over the next few days in order to celebrate the publication of  her baking-related story in the Mountain Magic anthology coming out on the 9th.

I’m going to share my favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe. I know, that’s kinda mundane, everyone has a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but to be honest, whenever we make chocolate chip cookie dough around here odds are we’ll nom it before it ever gets baked. So what follows is a recipe I’ve found is fantastic in both the cookie and dough states. And Danica agrees. Enjoy

Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 Cup butter (salted and softened)
1 Cup packed brown sugar
1/2 Cup white sugar
1 tsp of sale
2 tsp vanilla extract (real, not imitation. It matters, honest.)
2 eggs
1 tsp baking soda
2 1/4 Cups of flour
Chocolate chips
Skor bits (optional)

If you can do this in a mixer than you get bonus points. I sometimes start out with the hand mixer and then switch to a fork for lack of a funtastic uber mixing machine.

Cream the butter and sugars together, then add the salt and vanilla and mix it until its fluffy. Add the eggs and the baking soda and give it another mix, then start adding the flour. Finally add the chocolate chips and skor bits if you’ve got them. Drop by the spoonful onto a greased cookie sheet and back at 350 for about 11 minutes.

Nom nom nom!

Check out Beth’s recipe at her blog: Catch A Star As It Falls.

This post is kinda depressing, so I’ve decided to lighten it up with a couple cheery pictures I took of chubby little birds. Yay birds!

My ‘day job’ is writing advertising copy and descriptions. I often joke that my job is one that any monkey (who has been taught about search engine keywords) can do, but sadly my biggest clients have come to that same conclusion as well. They are automating most of the jobs I used to do and the one huge job I had which they couldn’t automate is now done. Done. This means that I am, for all intents and purposes, unemployed.

That, frankly sucks.

It especially sucks to be replaced by a computer. It really does, no matter how much I’ve joked about it in the past, the reality sucks.

So the good news is that I’ll have more time to finish up the mountainous pile of things on my neverending to-do list, but the bad news is, no one is going to be paying me as I do it. My plan is to do that; work on getting some of these things that don’t repeat (schoolwork, colaborative projects etc.) done and then, with Jo, reassess and decide on a next step.

Unfortunately all I can get in the traditional job market are minimum wage service industry jobs. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve held them before and in some ways have actually really, really enjoyed them, but meh. I’ve been spoiled. Spoiled by being about to pick my own hours, to see Dani off to school and be here when she gets home again, to have time to write in the afternoons and volunteer my time at the local elementary school. All that goes away if I take a job outside my house, and if I’m doing it for minimum wage, well, there are only a few jobs I can think of that I won’t be very resentful of. Happily, those few jobs do exist and they could be fun and have advantages of their own.

So yeah, things are pretty up in the air for me right now. I guess we’ll see what happens in a few weeks when I’ve finished some of these other things. In the meantime I’ll have a little extra time and who knows, I might even get this house clean. I won’t be washing the walls anytime soon for fun you understand, but you know, a little extra attention would probably not be a bad thing.

An important part of writing is being alive, and one way to extend my life (and increase the quality of it) is regular exercise. I am not a sporty person, I don’t like taking walks for the sake of the walk, or well, most exercise-y things. Still, I know from past expirience that if I establish a routine that includes working out I will do it, even when I don’t feel like it, and eventually my body will come to crave the exercise. I still won’t like it, but it will feel good as well as bad, so I’ll do it.

That makes me sound a little crazy doesn’t it? It’s true, but more importantly it’s a long way to go to get here: I need an accountability partner to help me set that initial routine.

I had one a while back and things were going great. We’d check in with each other every day and complain about how much our workout hurt (in this case it was The 30-Day Shred) or celebrate that it was getting easier. It was very motivating to me and on several days when I normally would have not exercised (and justified it to myself somehow) I forced myself to suck it up and just do it, because I knew my partner would be working out even though she didn’t want to.

Sadly my partner had an (unrelated) accident and a couple new developments that meant she has to take some time off working out like we were. Without her there to help motivate me, my working out also collapsed.

Jo is going to be my new accountability partner, but I thought I’d also put this out to the universe in case anyone else is interested in getting in on the ‘action’ I’ll be beginning to workout again on October 1st which gives you a little bit to talk yourself into doing this with me and dropping me a line (on either blog or email ). The more the merrier!

Also, there are only two more days left to enter the Goodreads contest to win a copy of Shades of Green:

Clicky, clicky. The more the merrier there too

Lastly, the image at the top is one I took of Danica the other day. I <3 the reflections in the bubble

Last weekend was spent at my parent’s in southern Alberta. It’s often rather tricky to find something for all of us to do and enjoy, but my mom hit on a wonderful idea when she suggested we go to the Birds of Prey Centre in Coaldale. I will totally be going back, but in the meantime some of the pictures I took on that trip will decorate this post.

So far I’m doing very well at my goal to write more consistently. I’ve not been allowing myself to play World of Warcraft unless I’ve written that day. Occasionally I’m not very good at the whole self-denial thing, but so far I’m pulling it off. That means less naps, and a more regimented daily routine in order to get everything I need to do and some of the things I want to do done, and I really like it. I’ve mentioned that I do very well if I have a routine? Well, that one resolution is helping me establish one.

I’ve been using a couple aps to help me stick to this. The first is called ‘Streaks’ and is really just a calendar where I can tap any day I’ve written on and it puts an X on the day. It keeps track of my streaks and if I miss a day that ends the streak and I have to start again. If you’ve got a brain like mine it’s surprisingly movitating to be able to make that little X appear on the screen, as well as not wanting to miss any days LOL The other ap just came out last night and I love it already. It’s called ‘Epic Win!’ and basically it lets you add your chores into a list and then as you do them you gain expirience points so your little avatar dude gets to level up and get gear. It’s like the ultimate nerd to-do list. I love it already.

So, yeah — so far so good. I’m getting a fair amount of writing done. I’ve written, revised and re-revised Chapter Eight of Lost and Found, for example. It’s done — I’ve sent it to Bill to work his magic on, that means no more changes for it. Chapter Nine has also been written and revised and is just waiting for me to send it to my critique group for their feedback before polishing it and calling it done.

Chapter Ten on the other hand…oh, chapter ten.

Happily my aps and my new routine will help me write it, and if it’s really bad, write it again, and again until I get it right. After all, I really need to get Lost and Found finished up, and then move on to Shadows. I’d been hoping to have the first draft of it finished and resting by November so I could work on something else for NaNo. I don’t think that’s going to happen now, but maybe. And either way, like the tortoise I’m making my way to the finish line. Slow and steady — because that’s how you win the race.

P.S. I got 50 expirience points for writing this blog post

This weekend we went to Fort Edmonton Park. We arrived on Saturday, stayed the night at the hotel there and then left on Sunday. A large motivation for the trip was just to have fun at the park as a family, but staying at the Selkirk Hotel was one of those things on my ‘Edmonton Bucket List’ (for lack of a better phrase) and I also wanted to turn it into a photo safari. The idea of being able to shoot things in the park without the crowds (between closing and opening) was too much to resist.

It was very nice. We had a lovely dinner and had fun hanging out with each other, meandering around the streets, petting horses and riding trains.

However, as a photo safari it did not meet my (ridiculously high) expectations. The problem wasn’t the setting, it was the photographer. That’s right, me.

I made a series of minor mistakes that piled up to mean several shots that could have been great were lost, or ruined, or just didn’t work. That being said, I’m still counting the trip as a success — even in regard to photography. Why? Well, because while I made a whack of mistakes, I also learned from them and I’m optimistic I won’t make them again — at least not in succession like I did this weekend.

I am still learning to apply that attitude toward my writing. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s true. While photography is a hobby that I am really enjoying right now, writing is my job, it’s what I do. Being a writer is who I am. So I put more pressure on myself for it than I do photography…but little by little I’m becoming more forgiving of my own imperfections, even in regard to writing.

I finished up a new chapter on Friday and within minutes sent it off to my critique group. That is not something I could have ever forced myself to do a year ago. No way. Now, granted, I sent it off that quickly because it’s part of Lost and Found which had deadlines of the looming kind and I wasn’t going to have time to let it set and revise before sending, but it’s still progress. And progress, often, is good.

So I’ll keep working on that, being forgiving toward myself and in the meantime I’ll share some of my Fort Edmonton photos here as I find time to process them because Arnold, at least, told me to keep sharing photos here and no one screamed ‘Oh God No!’

When Danica left here two weeks ago to enjoy a vacation at her grandparents without Jo or I she looked like this:

When she returned today, she looked like this:

I very nearly didn’t recognise her.

Don’t judge me

The important thing is she’s home and she had a good time. I guess that’s two things…

Incidentally, I never know if I should share these things here, or just keep them for my livejournal. Anyone care to offer an opinion?

Took this picture on the campus of Berkley University in 2009.

It’s the Alberta Legislature. I love that place, and I’m pretty fond of this picture of it too I took this in 2009.

I took this picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2009. I like it very much, though if we get back to San Francisco I intend to retake this shot with a polarizing filter on my lens to darken up the sky