Author: JennyTrout

I am, at this moment, torn between two options. One of them is finish my book that is due in mere days. The other is to spend my morning writing blistering hot m/m fanfic about Kirk Cameron’s “Mike Seaver” character and his now-legally married husband, Boner, on their big, gay wedding night.

“I’ve been falling down much lately,” my daughter, Wednesday, said, looking up at me sadly.
I nod, knowing that “lately” is, to my daughter, like “last night”. Any length of time, indeterminate from any other length of time. “Lately,” it was also Halloween. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You kicked me down the stairs.”
“What?!” It’s the only time I’ve actually heard myself interrobang. “I never kicked you down the stairs.”
Mutely, with her eyes closed but stretched tall in superiority, she nods.
“The only person getting kicked down the stairs here is Christian,” my husband chimes in, repeating the inside joke between him and our son. I’ve never realized how ghoulish it sounds until right now.
My son throws down his fork. “What the hell!”
“Christian, say ‘what the heck’!” Wednesday brandishes a fork threateningly.
“Never say ‘what the hell’ in school,” Husband advises our son.
“Or heck,” Christian corrects him.
That sounds awfully puritan for a public school. “You’d get in trouble for saying ‘what the heck’?”
Son nods.
In disbelief, daughter exclaims, “What the hell?”

It is after midnight, and I am up. I was asleep, two hours ago, when my daughter woke, screaming in pain from an earache. Now, she is on the couch with a hot compress on her ear, watching Sesame Street on Netflix, and I am still not sleeping.

I am six days from a deadline that, at the moment, seems impossible to meet. And I feel absolutely helpless to meet it. I don’t even have ten thousand words written, how can I possibly come up with an entire novella by March 7th?

I think back on the past few weeks, when I should have been writing the book. I start by blaming my children’s school. Three weeks ago, they decided to have some staff training. To accomplish this, they gave the children Thursday and Friday off. And for midwinter break, they decided to give them the following Monday, as well. The next week, a snow day obliterated any sense of normalcy in the household. This week, two half-days and a day off.

Stack on top of those circumstances my son’s testing for an autism spectrum disorder, an hour’s worth of travel for an hour’s worth of testing, once a week, during my prime writing time. I always take a notebook, thinking I’ll write. My husband spends the time flipping through fashion magazines and openly criticizing each photograph to me. Not much writing is accomplished during this time.

The field trip, that’s something, and the preschool pick-ups and drop-offs. Some important tax papers, that I had been putting off, needed faxing. Two separate trips to the only two civilian fax machines in town resulted in nothing but lost time; the treasure department for my state can’t spring for a dedicated fax line, apparently.

On days when my daughter is not at school, her demands are constant. She’s used to unwavering attention from her classroom’s teachers- two of them, for eighteen children-, as well as the constant stimulation they provide while she is there. She now expects the same at home, and is not content to color quietly.

I begin to look at my day in hour-long chunks, hoping I can squeeze some words out here and there. 6am, get up, get the kids breakfast. By 8:30, they should have all been dropped off at school and I can return home, where the kitchen needs to be cleaned. By 9am, I can sit down to write. The phone rings off the hook. This bill needs paying, this appointment needs rescheduling. The dogs need to go out, now they need to come in. I haven’t eaten anything all morning. I have to pick up daughter from preschool at 11, what time is it? 10:30? Already? Maybe I can get some writing done while she naps. I bring her home, serve her lunch and time to wind down from the stimulation of preschool. She’s down for a nap by 1pm, finally I can write. But I have to have my lunch, as well. I fix it, and sit down to write. It’s 1:30, and my first-shift husband comes through the door, tired and cranky about his job. He wants to talk about it. Now, it’s 2:30. Finally, I’m writing. For an hour, interrupted by phone calls. How much have I written? A sentence? At 3:30 my son comes home, the signal that my work day is over. He and his sister will fight. There will be slapping and pushing and screaming, and my husband will be too exasperated by them to effectively solve the problem. He’ll become exasperated with me, too, when I lose my temper because I just. Need. To Work. My brain is already too tired from fighting for time to write. I’ll just wait until after dinner. But after dinner, after the baths, after the kids are in bed after multiple trips to the bathroom, for water, whatever excuse they can dream up, I’m tired. I give up. I go to bed. Tomorrow will be different.

But tomorrow isn’t different. Tomorrow, I get up, I get the kids ready for school. I forget the testing appointment, FUCK! I have to call the school, and they’re put out with me calling yet again when I should have sent a note. At 10am, we’re headed to the far-off testing appointment. By the time we get home, it will be after 1pm, daughter will have briefly fallen asleep in the car, negating any chance of a nap for the day, and I will be too emotionally exhausted to try and write. It’s very hard to face that your child might have a handicap, that this might be the new reality. You can’t write about something as trivial as werewolves fucking, when you’re realizing that your child isn’t normal, and your brain is busy spending that time blaming everything you did, from daring to watch television when he was an infant to having him vaccinated. Meanwhile, I guiltily give in to my daughter’s every demand for my attention, even if it means I can’t do my job, because I’m worried the concern for her brother is leaving her in the cold.

I don’t know how to fix this problem. I do know that the book will be done on time. This will be accomplished through too many late nights, not enough sleep, at the expense of the house looking like the worst home ever featured on hoarders. I know I can do the work. I know I can write an excellent book. But at what cost?

It’s almost 1am. My daughter is still not sleeping, and my manuscript blinks at me while I guilty type this blog. No one wants to read about werewolves who can’t get their jobs done, though, and sometimes, you just need to let out the bad before you can use the good.

Last night was awesome. No, not because of the Oscars, although I did experience this strange phenomenon… every time Jean Dujardin was shown on screen, my panties fell down and I heard La Marseillaise playing from somewhere betwixt my nethers. That aside, last night was awesome because last night was EGG ROLL NIGHT.

Let me tell you about egg rolls. You have never had egg rolls as awesome as mine. But you will, one day. Because I’m going to show you how to do it.

You’re gonna need:
A big onion
Either three big bell peppers or four medium sized ones, it’s up to you.
Egg roll wrappers
Soy sauce
Wok oil
1/2 head Napa cabbage
Some cooked chicken cut into strips (totally optional, in fact, my egg rolls last night were vegetarian)

This is what you do:

Slice the onion, peppers, and cabbage into long, thin strips. Throw enough wok oil into a wok or a big frying pan so that stuff isn’t just sticking and burning all over the place. Heat your oil over medium-high heat, then throw in the onions. Sweat the onions before you add the peppers. Then sweat the peppers. Then throw in the cabbage and saute until it’s not rigid. Then throw on soy sauce to taste, saute a little longer. You don’t want the veggies to be mushy, but you don’t want them to be crunchy and uncooked. I mean, YOU might want them crunchy and uncooked, but these are MY awesome egg rolls, pal!

Where was I?

After you’ve got your pliable veggies all made pliable, toss them in the fridge to cool off for about thirty minutes. They cool off faster is you stir them. The veggies have to be cooled down, or else you’re going to end up disintegrating your wrappers. When they’re all cooled off, take the veggies out and get to work wrapping your egg rolls. If you don’t know how to do this, here’s a good tutorial. They recommend using a paste to seal them, honestly, I just use water because I’m hardcore.

The last step is the one I know nothing about. Frying the egg rolls. Now, if I’m making them by myself (as occasionally I do), I just spray them with olive oil spray and put them in the oven at 350 until they brown up a little. But if my husband is home, he fries them in oil on top of the stove. If you have a fry daddy, you could dump them in there, too. The point is, when you’re done, no matter what method you use, you’ve got a fuckton of egg rolls. I serve some for dinner, and when our gullets are so stuffed we cannot move (even to retrieve our mysteriously, Frenchly dropped panties), we freeze them to snack on them for the next couple weeks. Take two out, microwave them, and they come out pretty darn amazing.

That’s my egg rolls. They’re not fancy, but they’re very good. Much like me.

If you follow me on twitter (and if you don’t, why don’t you? You’re missing out on important stuff, like my love/hate relationship with Glee and stuff my cousin breaks when she comes over), then you already probably know what this post is going to be about. UFOs.

Hatred of Valentine’s Day isn’t reserved solely for the living. I have hated St. Valentine since the fifteenth century. That’s when all of this nonsense got started. Courtly love may have made it incredibly easy to lure women to their deaths, but it’s almost too easy. There’s no sport in it, especially when it’s a church sanctioned holiday. Vampires think of Valentine’s Day as amateur night.

I didn’t drop an f-bomb, either!

Today, I’m blogging at Reading For A Cure. Please take a moment to go check it out, and consider signing up for the reading challenge!

Wanna make some trout? I know you do. Here’s my recipe for trout and roasted red skin potatoes.

My grandmother is a treasure trove of crafting resources. If you need a certain type of fabric, she has it. If you’ve always wanted to latch-hook a rug, she’s got kits for that. She’s spent a lot of time at auctions, bidding on crafting lots, so occasionally she ends up with stuff she doesn’t need, like knitting stuff. She doesn’t knit, so she passes these things along to me, because I am also crafty.

This is how I came into possession of the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. The February-March 1984 edition of Annie’s Pattern Club. Behold:

It’s nice to know that Pennywise has some hobbies to keep him busy. Seriously, the first time I looked at this cover, I didn’t see the fucking clown. In fact, the second time I looked at this cover, I didn’t see the fucking clown. Like clowns often do, he was lurking, waiting to unleash his horror when I least expected it. I picked this up, said, “Huh, that’s kind of a cute afghan there I OH MY GOD NO.”

You’ll notice that the cover promises a needle craft “surprise”. What is that surprise, you ask? Murder. The surprise is murder. By clown. Possibly with a knitting needle.

Sweet dreams.