I went to the library yesterday to return a few books and browse to see if there were any more worth checking out.  I found four, scanned them at the checkout, and came home, aware that Matt needed the car for work.

I just checked my library account online, and it doesn’t register that I have anything checked out.

I must have forgotten to click “finish” on the computer yesterday.

Does this mean I’ve stolen books from the library?  Should I call them and let them know?  I’ve already read two and a half of the books–would it really hurt if I read the other one and a half and took them all back tomorrow?

This has never happened to me before.

I feel sheepish.

So I stayed up late last night to finish reading a book.  And then I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning.

Why is this news, you ask?

Because oddly enough I had fun dragging myself out of bed because I needed to go to work–and I’ve gotten quite a bit done on the manuscript, in fact.  I realized yesterday that one scene would go from “cool, but pointless” to “cool, and a building block for later events” if I simply changed who was the rescuer and who was the rescuee.  And the rest fell in line behind it.  Brilliant.  There are still a few things that need to be clarified, added, etc., but for now all the important things are there and things are lining up very well to tie this all into the next section.  The tying in has been a stumbling block for months now.

Now it’s time to turn my attention to Devlin’s thread and make sure everything’s set to weave these new introductions back into the fabric of the original manuscript.  I’m feeling quite optimistic.

Oh, and for those looking for a good romantic suspense, check out Cindy Gerard.

I apologize for my slackeriness lately.  I promised photos and other semi-exciting news and absolutely failed to produce on either.  More than that, I waited more than a week to apologize.

I blame the paint.  No, seriously, I painted my brother’s dining room last week.  I’m fairly certain the fumes didn’t get to me too much, but the painting and surrounding activities (like spectacularly burning a batch of sugar to their nice saucepan–I really am going to tell that story sooner or later) sort of got in the way.  And then I was flying home and enjoying the company of my husband and our dog, and everything got a bit out of hand.

I live a wild life, can you tell?

At any rate, the writing is progressing and I got a satisfying amount of stuff done *aside* from the writing yesterday as well, so that always makes Betsy a happy girl.

Also, I’m working on reorganizing our LibraryThing so that I don’t have to use both LT and Goodreads (nothing against Goodreads, there are some things I like about it very much, but I’m trying to simplify) AND you will actually be able to access my 2009 reading list, the link for which has been nonfunctional pretty much since I posted it.

Finally, those of you who read directly from my website as opposed to through the various feeds have probably already noticed that the look of the website has changed–again!  But I’m a big fan of this one and it seems to all function properly and I have a feeling the new look is going to stick around for a while.

Now, time for a quick bowl of cereal, making some tea, and then writing!  So lovely to make progress.

I mentioned briefly at some point that I was headed to Ohio to visit family, and that is where I’ve been.  Aren’t you glad I’m not a liar?

The flight and everything surrounding it went well on Thursday, and we (my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew) spent Friday morning at the doctor’s and then the zoo, the latter of which was lots of fun for everyone.  Friday evening and most of Saturday, the lovely, brilliant theologian Marva Dawn was a guest speaker at a conference hosted by my brother’s church.  That was a great deal of fun as well as being educational and though-provoking, AND my high school English teacher was there, so I got to chat with her for a few minutes.

As if that weren’t enough excitement, on Saturday morning we were all woken by the beeps, clangs, and rumbles of heavy machinery–William is firmly in the phase of fascination with all kinds of trucks, and he stood transfixed for several hours as the men ripped out the old, ugly cement stairs in front of the house.  I say “stood,” but there was also a fair amount of dancing, wiggling, and jumping up and down in excitement.  I took pictures, but they really don’t compare.

Sunday morning and half the afternoon was church, as usual, and then I ran to the grocery store while the house turned into The Napping House, and I made a giant cookie for a dessert pizza that they took to a picnic in the evening.  I, on the other hand, drove up to my parents’ house and had dinner with my parents, grandfather, and aunt and uncle.

Returning to Saturday night, I babysat for William while Nathan and Johanna went out to dinner, and after a screaming bedtime routine, William went to sleep within minutes of my turning out the light.

And then I embarked on the Horrific Computer Transfer.  I didn’t know that’s what it would be when I started.  If I had, I might have made more demands.  You see, I helped my mother switch from Windows to Mac about a year and a half ago, and she’s never been entirely happy with it.  That’s okay–I’ve always acknowledged that there are some people for whom Windows works just fine, and my mom is one of them.

So, since I was planning on being in the area for a while, I offered to help her buy a new PC and switch her files back over while I’m here.

Because I like sticking forks in my eyeballs for fun.

Also, Matt and I get the old MacMini when I go home.  (Yay more computers!)

At any rate, after I put William to bed Saturday night I went about setting up both computers so that I could get down to the work of the switcheroo.  It went well for a while, and then I ran into trouble with transferring files, since I couldn’t get both machines online at the same time with any kind of ease.  So I found a blank cd, burned the files I needed to transfer, and loaded most of them on the new computer.  I knew the email files weren’t going to be very nice, so I saved them for last.

Suffice to say that I am having problems.  There’s not a lot of documentation online about switching from Mac back to PC, and the vast majority of THAT is from OS 10.3 or earlier, which is just ridiculous since we’re on 10.6 now.  Mail files look like mboxes, but aren’t any more; the emlx-to-mbox converter I tried to use didn’t work; and before I even got to that point there were several hours in which I was moderately concerned that I might have lost all my mother’s emails entirely.  That is significant both because she does a lot with email and keeps a lot of things saved there, and also because it would have been an idiotic thing for me, of all people, to do.  I was going to try to convert using Thunderbird as a “translator” since it runs on both platforms, but I have been thwarted at every turn there, too.

I am beginning to seriously consider more drastic (and seriously annoying) actions.  Also, as a pre-emptive strike here, in this entry I have not even begun to give details either on the situation or on what I’ve tried to do (literally just about everything.  I’m more thorough than most people.), so general “have you tried this?” comments probably won’t be greeted with much grace at this point.  If you have extensive experience specifically with moving obstinate Mac Mail version 3.6 files into Windows Mail, feel free to send me a private email.  Otherwise, commiseration and rantings about how idiotic the technology world can be are most welcome from everyone.

That about sums up my visit so far: good times with family, lots of fun, and ongoing desires to scream at computers.

I’ll try to post some photos tomorrow.  In the meantime, look out for an Exciting Announcement!  (Don’t get too excited, though.)

For those who have not been paying attention, today was New Stove Day!  Before the old one was hauled away, I took this photo of the damage:

Yes, the oven floor is a bit dirty, but at least it was not flaming.  For those who really like details, the right portion of the broken coil was the bit that wasn’t getting power, and the left bit was the angry red/white-hot/flaming bit.  The flame traveled from the broken end up and around about the where the top rack crosses it in the photo.  Maybe a bit more.  As I said before:  alarming.  I do not recommend it as an experience everyone should have.

So the new oven came today.  It’s white and extremely clean (it makes our white-painted cabinets look a bit dingy), and it doesn’t have a window in the door or an oven light.  But it seems to cook things just fine, which is really the material point, and I can’t blame the landlord for going a bit cheap on his rental property instead of shelling out a big load of cash.  See?  New oven:

And to initiate it, I thought it was appropriate to cook myself a chicken pot pie for lunch.  That which brought the last one to its death will initiate the new appliance’s life.  Or something.  It smelled something awful for a while, but that was only alarming until I decided that was “new oven smell” (which is decidedly not as nice as “new car smell”–no one will be bottling it and selling it at Wal*Mart) and in the end I had a perfectly lovely chicken pot pie made with ABSOLUTELY NO FLAMES INVOLVED.

To be entirely candid, the bottom was less crispy than I really like, but that could be because I didn’t preheat the baking pan like I usually do.  I will report on this high-interest story as it develops.

In other news, I need to go officially turn in my key and access card and final timesheet to leave the day job behind.  I should probably call Matt and make sure he remembers that so I can have the car.  Also, the new writing regime has been working quite well, and I anticipate consistent progress in the future as well.

Finally, I leave for Ohio tomorrow, so you can expect things like updates of me with my adorable nephew for the next week or so.  And funny things I see at the airport.  And whatnot.

I’m sure there’s more, but it will have to wait.  You know how it is.

Look! Prettiness! At least it will do for now… and perhaps until I get back from Ohio in a few weeks. I’ll be here and there between now and then. Mmm generic promises. Toodaloo!

For those of you actually reading this via my website rather than Facebook or a feed, you might notice that the blog is lacking in its usual visual charms.

This is because after several hours of wrestling with the back-end software update that runs the blog, I have emerged victorious but not unscathed.  In other words, I lost my pretty themes, but I’ll get them back soon.

Just not tonight.  Maybe not tomorrow either.

I promise you can handle it until then.

Really.

I promise.

Those of you who are Facebook and/or Twitter friends already know about our flaming oven, but I thought it was worth more than a couple of 160-character update.

Once upon a time (read: Friday evening) a we were at home after a busy day of doing our various busy things. In fact, we were only home for a little while, as Matt was shortly expected at a friend’s house for poker night and I was expecting friends (mostly wives of those at poker) to arrive for a girls’ night in. He planned to eat while playing poker; I fell back on a perennial staple, chickie pa’ pah (read: chicken pot pie). I pre-heated the baking pan for a nice crispy bottom crust, wrapped tin foil around the edge to prevent burned edges, and set my handy-dandy kitchen timer for the requisite baking time.

About five minutes before the timer was supposed to go off, as I was reading on the couch, I heard a faint “pop pop pop-pop” from the kitchen. It sounded a lot like microwave popcorn, but quieter. Maybe something *else* exploding in the microwave?

So I asked, “Matt, are you cooking something in the microwave?” My tone was rather skeptical because, as you may remember, Matt was expecting to eat later and he’d already had a snack.

“No, but you have something in the oven,” he said, as if I were a rather slow four-year-old who would forget that my supper was cooking even though my stomach was trying to eat itself at that point. (I love you, sweetie.) I extremely reluctantly marked my spot in the book, got out from under my cozy blanket on the couch, and went to check on my pot pie, just in case something very odd had happened and it was boiling over.

I feel it necessary to mention that never in all my years of cooking Marie Callender’s most excellent individual chicken pot pies has one of them bubbled over, much less gotten past my tin foil rim AND the baking sheet to make ploppy sizzles on the oven floor that will bake on and set the fire alarm off in a week or so. But I stopped reading and went to check on it Just In Case, secretly hoping the popping noise (which had been going steadily for several minutes since I’d noticed it) was the result of something silly Matt had done and forgotten about. Because I did not want my pot pie to be ruined. I was hungry.

A quick glance through the oven window showed nothing amiss with the pot pit, but a bit of extra brightness down in the front corner of the oven. Maybe something else ran over and now caught fire?

I opened the oven door, and blinked several times.

Me: Um… Matt? The oven is on fire.

Matt (in the living room, unconcerned): That’s not good.

Me: No. The oven is on fire. The metal is flaming.

Matt scurried to my aid with satisfying speed, and by the time he got there I had turned off the oven and was staring in consternation at the heating element, which had actually broken. One end was black (and presumably cool, though we didn’t touch it) and the other end was glowing angry red and shooting off sparks at the end. And flaming, of course. Just a bit at the end, not the whole thing. Maybe a half-inch of the metal was actually flaming, and it wasn’t particularly a huge flame. Maybe an inch tall. But it was in our electric oven. In case you have never used an electric stove before, flames are really quite bad.

Anyway, the oven knob was now turned to “off”, which I expected to mean that the red-hot-ness and the yellow flaming-ness and the throwing off sparks-ness would dissipate. But they didn’t. There was more redness and a bit more flaming, though it did stop sparking as the white-hot area immediately inside the flame began to travel slowly away from the broken end and toward the power source. It was like a very slow magnesium burn.

It was also very alarming.

Matt tossed a cup of cold water on the heating element to cool it down.

Safety note: in retrospect this was a STUPID STUPID idea, but we really thought no power was running through it. Actually, we weren’t really thinking at all. As I mentioned, we were rather alarmed. I am very glad I was not there alone. Regardless, please don’t follow our example. The water did nothing anyway, except run down into all my cake pans in the bottom drawer and then onto the floor in a huge rusty puddle that I had to clean up later.

So the water (STUPID IDEA!) was ineffective, and the flame was still burning its way along the heating element and Matt realized this was all going to go south very fast and he started pulling the stove out from its little nook in the counter so I could reach back and unplug the whole thing.

Everything calmed down right away, and I called my Mommy to tell her we didn’t burn the down the building. Matt sent the landlord an email rather apologetically informing him that we need a new stove (which is supposed to be delivered sometime on Wednesday), and we proceeded with our evening as planned.

For those who are interested, my chicken pot pie was not fully cooked (evidence that perhaps there had been issues for some time before I noticed them) and when I put it in the toaster oven to finish cooking I was completely mistaken in my estimate of how much time it needed–and it ended up charred and mostly inedible anyway. I had ice cream, popcorn, and peanut m&ms for dinner.

Don’t judge me. My oven tried to blow up.

In other news, this week will effectively mark the end of my day job. It hasn’t been the job I signed on for since the middle of June or so, and it’s an entirely amicable parting–in fact, I suggested that it was time for them to stop employing me, given various circumstances. So we will have a test period of me being a Real Writer, complete with external accountability checkpoints because I am like a greased weasel if I try to keep myself on track. And if I, you know, finish things and send them out and sell them, I have permission not to get another day job in the foreseeable future. Woohoo!

Also, I am close to insanely jealous of Neil Gaiman’s library. Close.