Another completed story

Finished my second story. It took just about 6 weeks and topped out at almost exactly 9,000 words. I laugh to think that I intended this to be shorter than my previous story. I swear the next one is going to be short!

Just need to go through the comments from my lovely editor-in-chief and then I plan to ship it off to Writers of the Future this week. I think this is a really good story, much better than my first.

Have you seen this cat?

 

Because it is awesome

Because it is awesome

Link courtesy Urban Prankster.

In other news, go ahead and mark your calendar for the Chicago Zombie March on June 13th!

You’ve been waiting a whole year to dress up like a zombie and hit up the city… so let’s do it again!

You know the deal… meet up at the field at Millennium Park at 2:00 pm on June 13th in your best zombie get-ups.

Remember: Haunted House Rules apply! No touching strangers, don’t make a mess, mind your own business. Just use your common sense — every zombie-style event this city’s seen has gone well, and the police have noticed — let’s keep up the good rapport!

Contact us at brains@chicagozombie.com with questions/comments/concerns, and keep watch on http://www.chicagozombie.com andhttp://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=74192873814 for all your braingnoshing updates.

She takes after her daddy

After polishing off an entire avocado for her afternoon snack, Evie leaned back and smirked, “Daddy’s ‘mpressed.”

Fairly uneventful weekend. Evie had her first ice cream cone. She wasn’t too messy, but she didn’t really get the idea of eating the cone so she was burying her nose in there trying to get as much out of the cone as possible. We did some shopping at some places we don’t go very often, including buying enough food to stock a pantry that would make a Mormon blush. Blame it on my current end-of-the-world-scenario reading.

There has been a recipe floating around my extended family recently, but we just finally got around to making it. Basically you dump all the ingredients in a mug, mix it up, microwave it and voila, chocolate cake for one.

The first one sort of exploded like a chocolate volcano in our microwave. Our tip is to do it on 70% power. Sara pointed out that if the recipe is old they probably had lower power microwaves back then. Also, if you can manage it, use an extra tall mug. Those two things combined seemed to do the trick for the second cake.

I’d have to say, not bad at all. The taste is good, though the texture is sort of odd. I wouldn’t make it just to eat it, but it may be worth it for the fun of making cake in a mug. Also, it is single serving size which certainly has its advantages. So, if you’re like stuck on a desert island where you can’t get cake but you inexplicably have a microwave or some other strange cake-less situation (like you live in Norway), I’d say give it a try.

Chocolate Mug Cake

4 tbs flour
4 tbs sugar
2 tbs cocoa
1 egg beaten
3 tbs milk
3 tbs oil
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt

Mix ingredients together and pour into large coffee mug. Microwave 3 min. Remove cake from cup and slice into 6 pieces. Drizzle with caramel or chocolate syrup and cool whip on top.

Bacolicio

Newsflash, everything is better with bacon. Everything. And that includes web pages. Thus, I give you bacolicio.

All you need to do is prepend http://bacolicio.us/ in front of any URL, to have that page served with a side of bacon. For example, check out:
http://bacolicio.us/https://erith1.wordpress.com

Or you can try bacolicio’s excellent example:
http://bacolicio.us/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism

Link courtesy Joe Maffey.

The Flu Pandemic

Well, the first cases of swine flu in Illinois have been confirmed, including 2 cases where Sara works. Which, obviously, reminds me of this song, by the Flying Fish Sailors:

Nothing can cheer you up about deadly flu faster than a pirate band.

I’m not sure what the deal with the swine flu is. I feel like people are trying to make me flip out about it, but I just can’t bring myself to be that worried about it. As far as I can tell, with less than 100 cases confirmed in the U.S. (that’s about .00003% of the population if I did my math right) and only one death, it is far far less common or deadly than the regular flu. Now, certainly it could continue to grow and then maybe we should start to worry, but it seems to me like the incidence is much lower right now than the reaction.

Well, the good news is, there is a website you can go to, doihaveswineflu.org