Check this out first. A tutorial on How to Bow! (Thanks to Languagehat for the link.)
So the mail arrives. Credit card bill, junk mail, satellite viewing card. And this: “The Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation …congratulates you on the selection of your Young Wizards series for a special commendation…recognizing your outstanding contribution to children’s fantasy literature in the Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize in Children’s Literature.”
The commendation goes on: “The Committee congratulates Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series for its courage in tackling moral and emotional issues set on the frontiers of magic. In addition, the author’s diverse worldview enhances the appeal of the series.”
Wow, oh wow.
After this, it’s kind of hard to be annoyed that I still can’t find the long version of the soup recipe.
It’s what submarine crews do. One shift rolls out of the bunks, gets dressed, goes to work: the other shift goes off work, undresses, falls into bunks still warm from crewmates’ bodies.
Around here “hot-bunking” means both of us working on the same project, in shifts, more or less 24 hours a day. We’ve done it before (for example, while I was story-editing “Dinosaucers” and finishing work on The Romulan Way with Peter). We’re doing it now on The Ring, while I also work on Wizard’s Holiday.
The problem with this kind of schedule is that, with both of us so intent on the work, local nutrition tends to suffer. Which is bad, because in such cases work suffers too. However, we have a standard household solution for this problem. It’s the justly famous “Mitternachtsuppe” or “Midnight Soup” recipe from the Department of Nuclear Chemistry of the University of Mainz. It’s fast; it’s easy to make; the pot can be more or less constantly replenished with the same ingredients as the soup level falls (or with different ones, so that the soup changes subtly from day to day or even hour to hour); it can be kept simmering on the stove for long periods without damaging the quality of the soup (in fact it just gets better the longer it goes on); and it freezes well, so if when you finish a project you also find you’re tired of the damn stuff, you can just sock it into the freezer and come back to it another time.
Our take on it appears below momentarily (as soon as I find where I’ve hidden it from myself. Trouble is, I know the recipe so well by now that I rarely bother referring to it).
ETA, 18 September 2024: The recipe’s normal home at EuropeanCuisines.com is down for refurbishment at the moment. Nonetheless, here’s that recipe.
The ingredients:
- 1 – 2 kabanossi or similar mildly spicy sausage (and any other sausages you favor: frankfurters, pepperoni, you name it…)
- 100 grams bacon, the smokier, the better
- 2 onions
- 400 grams ground beef (or you can substitute ground turkey or chicken if you prefer, but the soup works better with beef)
- 1 can cannellini or similar white beans
- 2 cans red kidney beans
- 750 ml beef stock or bouillon
- 1 or 2 cans chopped tomatoes, according to your preference
- 1-2 cloves garlic
- To taste: regular chili powder (maybe a teaspoon)
- To taste: Paprika (hot paprika if you like, but don’t overdo it. Smoked paprika also works well)
- To taste: Hot chili flakes
- To taste: a shake or two of Tabasco sauce
- To taste: a shake or two of Worcestershire sauce
- To finish: 200 ml yogurt or creme fraiche
Find a large heavy soup pot. Chop up the bacon and sauté it until the fat runs. Chop up the onions and sauté them with the bacon: then add the sausages, also chopped, sauté them briefly, add the garlic and do the same. Finally add the ground beef and sauté it until it colors. Season this mixture with the spices and seasonings and continue to sauté. Meanwhile heat the beef stock to near boiling: add it to the mixture in the pot and stir well. Add the beans and tomatoes. Allow the whole business to boil for a few minutes: then lower the heat, cover, and simmer for at least an hour.
When serving, ladle out the soup and stir a spoonful of yogurt or créme fraiche into each serving.
This recipe doubles well. It can also be extended over several days by adding more beans, more stock, more sauteed sausages, etc., as necessary.
The tree in the image to the left was just bare branches yesterday…or so it seemed. This morning I looked out the window and found it all covered with that perfect, tender new spring green.
It would be nice if the sudden change in weather hadn’t left us both with pounding sinuses, but that happens sometimes. Nothing to do but take an antihistamine and get on with things. The Ring work is going forward nicely, but the workload has just increased considerably with the urgent need to produce an extra draft well before what was the originally scheduled turn-in date. Argh!
Oh well. In the famous six stages of a project, this simply means we’ve progressed as far as “Total Confusion.” It was bound to happen eventually…
Every now and then I come back to Joseph Brennan’s Abandoned Stations site to see what’s new. Particularly of interest to SYWTBAW readers will be the page that deals with the City Hall IRT station. Though there are actually two City Hall “stations”, the other being a never-completed BMT facility, this would have been the one where the dragon was — the descriptions in the text of the “high ceiling” and the curved platform make the identification clear. Granted, the way Nita and Kit reach the spot in the book is somewhat circuitous, and doesn’t necessarily match “reality”. (But then they were in an alternate universe at the time, and one where things were unusually likely to be skewed.)
An interesting side issue is that a street named for a relative of mine is so very close…
Up at 6 AM, as is more or less usual for me (a) at this time of year, and (b) when the work schedule is like it is at the moment: the body is running on its nerves a little bit, and tends to wake right up after it’s had enough sleep to deal with the necessary REM activity and get rid of the lactic acid.
Also assisting me in this business of getting up are some of the birds around here. There are two that stand out.
One is a highly territorial blackbird which has decided to make its stand out in the entwined holly tree / elder tree on the west side of the house. The damn thing is piercing in volume, and astonishing in the variety of other birds’ songs it sings when it gets bored with its own. It makes me think of that night over at C.J. Cherryh’s, so long ago, when a mockingbird up on her chimney so annoyed us both with its deafening singing in what should have been the dead of night that Carolyn was strongly tempted to shoot it. (That was the night we stayed up to watch anime and drank sufficient akvavit to begin to understand Japanese. At least it seemed that way at the time.)
The other avian offender is an invisible presence in the beeches on the north side of the house. We refer to this creature as “the Bee-Wee Bird,” because that’s what it says: “Bee-wee. Bee-wee. Bee-wee.” Over and over and OVER… I would shoot it with pleasure, if I had a gun, but I don’t; and if I go looking for it with a hand-and-a half-broadsword, or even Peter’s new rapier, the neighbors will talk.
(sigh)
Never mind: I probably just need some caffeine. Peter was up all night with the Ring script again, and was incredibly hoarse this morning as a result. (When he’s intent on his writing, he subvocalizes, so that after one of these long-haul stints, when he actually speaks aloud, he sounds very like Marlon Brando.) This all-night work is his forte — he’s always been the owl to my lark — but it means that sometimes we hardly see each other during the more intense parts of a project. Or our paths cross only briefly in the afternoons, when he gets up around 2 (having fallen over around 7 AM, usually). We chat, lay plans, then get back to work, pausing to feed the cats and ourselves, every now and then. Other activities (shall we say “fraternization”) can just wait until after deadline. Manwhile, I fall over around 11 PM to the sound of typing, typing, typing in the next room (P’s office is across the landing from our bedroom).
(small wry smile here) All you “I want to be a writer” types: beware. You might get your wish.
…since almost certainly I know some of these people. “European animators gathered in the historical German city of Erfurt April 24 – 26 for the latest Cartoon Masters meeting to look at the creative side of the business.
“The Cartoon Master series is sponsored by the European Union subsidy org Media Program.”
However, they have a finance-oriented get-together scheduled for Cardiff at the end of June. Might make that, I suppose, if other business travel permits.
Or the Spike on the Pike, as some call it. (And I’m amused to see from the filename of the image to the right that at least one Web designer at the Times calls it that too.) NB: the “live” camera was a little crooked this morning, so I corrected the image. …Anyway, the Irish Times has a Dublin weathercam here — I haven’t looked at it for ages. But now that the Spire is up, the main webcam (looking north across O’Connell Bridge) gets a great view of it.
I know there are people who don’t care for the look of the Spike. I like it, though; I think it’s just what O’Connell Street needed. Possibly the opinion is irrational.
Meanwhile the rain continues. The fishpond is getting very full: the fish are spending a lot of time near the top of the water, either because the rain has warmed the pond up somewhat and they’re feeling more active, or because there are bugs to catch. (Not that I’ve had time to stand out there and watch to see if that’s what they’re doing.)
They may be warmer, but I’m chilly enough. I think I’ll light another fire in a while. 
(This is one of the good things about having your office in the living room, where the fireplace is… The other good thing about it is that tending the fire forces the busy writer to get up, stretch and walk around every half hour or so: go outside to the woodpile, get a little more wood… get another cup of tea, and settle down to work again. They used to tell us in nursing school that getting up to walk around every half hour, while studying or doing desk work, was imperative. Might be they had something there…)
My log files tell me that people have been wandering in here looking for news on some very delayed projects (at the moment, most specifically Rihannsu: The Empty Chair). And why wouldn’t they? So I’ve put a little list of what’s being worked on over in the first sidebar, under the fish count.
I know you folks are impatient about some of these projects, and you have a right to be. That said, I’m working quite hard right now, so please don’t joggle my elbow, OK? If you can be patient for just a little more, I’ll appreciate it.
And, as the nice men used to say (do they still?), “Thank Yew for Yer Continued Support.”
“The Savoy cinema in Dublin has dismantled a device it used to scramble mobile-phone signals, following an intervention by the Commission for Communications Regulation.” (Note: this link might be inaccessible if it’s been designated “premium content” — apologies if this is the case.)
“The Savoy had installed a device called a MobileBlocker to prevent people from making or receiving calls within the auditorium.
“‘What we had was a very low-powered device, which only affected the auditorium of the Savoy 1,’ said Mr Mark Anderson, operations manager of the Ward Anderson Group, which runs the Savoy complex.
“‘I thought the legal position was a lot more vague than it turned out to be.'”
The effect of the Gulf Stream on Ireland’s climate came up (it keeps winters mild enough, by and large, for palm trees and various other subtropicals to grow successfully). Here are a few links about that (the last one the best in my opinion, though it deals only glancingly with Ireland per se):
A snippet from “Earth and Sky”
From Coastal and Geodetic Survey Stories & Tales: including Benjamin Franklin’s early notes on the subject. (That man…there was nothing he wasn’t interested in. But then, as the excerpt shows, the subject came up in the couse of his business as Postmaster-General.)
A little earlier in the same article: Martin Frobisher says (in the 1570’s): ” Sayling toward the northwest parts of Ireland we mette with a great current from out the southwest, which carried us [by our reckoning] one point toward the northeastward of our said course, which current seemed to us to continue itself toward Norway and other of the northeast parts of the world, whereby we may be induced to believe that this is the same which the Portugese mette at Capo de Buong Speranza [Cape of Good Hope], where, stricking over from thence to the Straits of Megellan and finding no passage there for the narrowness of the sayde Straits, runneth alongue to the great Bay of Mexico, where also having a let of land it is forced to strike back again toward the northeast, as we not only here but 
in another place also further northward by goode experience this year have found.” The writer of the article adds: “How the currents returned to the Cape of Good Hope from the ‘northeast parts of the world’ is not stated, but the general course of the Atlantic system is very fairly laid out.”
…This could start to get fascinating, and I have work to do, so I should stop this now. To one side, though, you can see a thumbnail of Athanasius Kircher’s 1678 chart of the Gulf Stream in the south Atlantic: the first one made, apparently.
Meanwhile, it’s a chilly, blowy, wet morning: high winds roaring through the branches of the trees, heavy rain. I lit a fire and took a 
turn through the house to see where the cats are. All are scattered hither and yon in attitudes suggesting that no one in their right mind would be conscious during weather like this: that the only thing to do is sleep through it. Well, it’s nice that they can get away with it, but for my own part, I need to go make some tea and then get busy with Holiday. (And later, see what Peter did with the script last night. He was up till something like 5 AM with it.)