Minerva let Chekhov’s gun fall to the floor. Her creator unraveled to text, which itself fell to dust.
She took nothing, did not glance at the moose head above her desk as she left. Hundreds of staring doll eyes met her gaze on the other side of the door, but Minerva ignored them. More taxidermy watched her flight down the steps.
“Are you–”
“Story’s Over.” Minerva replied, cutting off the front desk volunteer. She didn’t slow down, swept through the gallery and pushed open both sets of doors, batting away a buzzing fly that flew at her face.
Her car chirped as she unlocked the doors. She didn’t know where she was going, only that it was away. No more museums. No more mishaps.
Minerva narrowly missed pulling out in front of the bus painted to look like a cow. That was not how this ended. Her creator would have ended it there. Thought only of how it was an amusing and embarrassing way to die. This Minerva didn’t want to die.
She pulled out on to the highway and headed east. No driving into the sunset. No heading off of a cliff. Minerva Zimmerman’s story wasn’t over.
So the other day my husband Aaron was like, “I’d like a savory veggie pie.” Which I thought was a fantastic idea, and after a little poking about I decided to make roasted veggie pot pies with a beer cheese sauce. Because it sounded delicious. I basically modified this recipe to use this beer cheese dip instead of the original sauce. Also I used pre-made pie crust because life is too short and I can’t taste the difference.
Step 1: Roast WAAAAY too many veggies. I opted for butternut squash, brussel sprouts, and cauliflower. I drizzled them with garlic olive oil and salt and peppered them before roasting at 425F for 20 minutes, stirring at 10 min.
Step 2: Admire the roasted veggies. Use spatula to smack the hand of the person who keeps stealing the brussel sprouts.
Step 3: Dice a sweet onion. Add it to a pot with 2 tbs butter and fry until soft. Add sliced mushrooms and chopped garlic from a jar (or you could have pressed some into the onions originally)
Step 4: Combine all cooked veggies into one dish so you have room to move in your miniscule kitchen.
Step 5: Cheese sauce! First, make a roux with butter and flour, then add the 1/2 cup of milk and 2/3rds cup of beer. Yell at someone else to come drink this open beer even though it’s only 3pm because… sacrifices have to be made. Look in vain for dry mustard powder… decide to omit it. Add the cheese in batches. Using Manchego you have no idea why you ended up with and the last dregs of the open sharp cheddar. Turn Stove to low to keep sauce from setting up.
Step 6: Prep your crusts. I used pre-made crust I then sprinkled no-salt garlic pepper blend on and patted into the dough. I also used an extra-big (Costco-sized) muffin pan. I cut out the bottom crusts with a plastic pitcher lid, but then combined all the remaining dough and just cut it into 6 equal portions for the top crusts which I patted out by hand rather than find my rolling pin.
Step 7: ADD VEGGIES!!!
Step 8 ADD CHEESE (and apparently top crusts cause I didn’t take a second picture)
Step 9: Totally Fail at making the pies really pretty AND fail to have eggs in the house to make an egg wash with.
Step 10: Poke the Pies with a Knife so they don’t burst and then bake them at 375F for about 25 minutes (I did them a little less).
Step 11: Cool slightly then turn out your little pies.
Step 12: EAT (and you can totally wrap them and freeze them for later if you made 2 batches like I did… also make some veggie burritos cause you had even more left over roasted veggies OM NOM NOM)
I want to love this pen. I want to love it with the fierce passion of a thousand dying suns. It’s cheap, easily available, has easily obtained cartridges, and has a cushy grip. I WANT TO LOVE YOU SHEAFFER CALLIGRAPHY PEN!!! WHY MUST YOU DO ME SO WRONG? (Amazon You can also find this particular pen in your average craft section)
Pen with cap in hand. As you can see, it is a pretty good-sized pen, but not overly heavy.
It clogs. It is nearly impossible to get the ink going. It has a scratchy horrible nib that makes your handwriting look amazing but the act of writing a chore. You have to hold the pen almost completely vertical to keep it flowing. I had such a bad time with it, I bought a second pen assuming that I’d had a defective product. Nope. The fine-tip seems to clog worse than the others.
Left to Right: Orange Sheaffer Cartridge, Turquoise Scheaffer Cartridge, Fine Nib, Medium Nib, Sheaffer converter, pen body (Note that it has a HOLE in it to see the ink levels. This is useful, but the hole tends to dig into your hand while writing), Cap
Pens put together with cartridges. Oh hey! I found the Broad Nib too.
I repeat, this pen takes FOREVER to get the ink started. It requires a lot of fiddling. I always end up ink-stained using this pen. You also REALLY need a piece of scratch paper to get the ink flowing again every time you stop writing for longer than a second. Yes. I’m serious. If you pause to get a thought together… you may have to restart the ink from scratch. *scratch scratch scratch goes the nib*
To be completely fair, this pen isn’t really made for writing. Well, I mean it is, but it is specifically designed for doing small amounts of decorative calligraphy. Which, I mean it probably does, but you can also get those disposable chisel tipped felt pens for that. I don’t really know calligraphy. I mean I had a book at one point, but it was one of those “Thaaaaaaanks Aunt and Uncle So and So” gifts when I was of an age to I don’t know… wanted top 40 hits on cassette tape or something. (Yes. Cassettes. Get off my lawn.)
This pen does make my handwriting look really nice. I mean I’m not remotely trying to do proper calligraphy in the writing example. However, it took me about 30 minutes of fiddling to get both pens writing and you can see the scratch paper I was using there at the bottom.
The Good
Relatively inexpensive
not heavy in the hand
makes pretty handwriting
rubbery grip
easily obtained
easily switched nib sizes
can use a converter
The Bad
ink window digs into hand
proprietary cartridge
proprietary converter
clogs
hard to start ink
requires lots of fiddling
super scratchy writing
nib bites the paper
have to hold fairly vertical
Overall grade: C
Well, it’s not made badly… it just isn’t made for writing. If you’re going to address a bunch of invitations it will probably work just fine for that. As an everyday writer, it is not good. I do like the way the writing looks, it just isn’t a very enjoyable writing experience in any way.
Actual number of bags removed within the 40 days: 48
Additional bags removed the day after Easter: 21
Work related recycle and junk disposed of: 2 truck loads
Actual rooms dealt completely sorted= 2 (that would be the laundry room and bathroom) 😦
So, yes, I achieved my goal but I don’t feel particularly accomplished. There’s still A LOT of clutter and sorting that needs to be done. The vast majority of what I got rid of was recycle and trash, not clutter. I’d guess the actual amount of removed non-trash clutter at more like 10 bags. I haven’t even started on the stuff we just store upstairs.
I think I need to keep this up until I feel that I’ve gone over the whole household once. If I’m going to be reasonable, I should probably think that will probably take more than 40 days. Let’s give myself 60 additional days to continue working on this. I’ll just mark it on my writing calendar with round stickers for each bag or equivalent. I’ll give myself a little wiggle room and start the new cleaning binge on May 1 and end it on June 30.
Minerva sat at her desk adding inventory data to the computer catalog system.
“Hey.”
Minerva looked up and saw herself standing there. “What the–”
“Hi,” said her doppleganger. “Author Minerva here again. Have you figured out what all these Museum Mishaps have in common my fictional self?”
Fictional Minerva looked confused. “A museum?”
“Well, mostly– but the only thing they ALL have in common, is you– Fictional Minerva and your extreme carelessness. When I decided to write all these mishaps I thought it’d be a lot easier to kill you with museum hazards, because they ARE real and can be deadly. However, I’ve had to force you to be kind of a nitwit to imperil you again and again. The REAL Minerva can be lazy and do shortcuts for most things, but I never take the kind of chances I’ve forced you to take again and again. I mean, partly it helps that I managed to convince the doctor to do an arsenic test and I came up clean, but really just writing out how badly things have to go to kill me has made me feel much safer at my job.”
Fictional Minerva sighed. “Well, catharsis is healthy. I’m glad I helped you out in some small way. However, you’ve forgotten one thing.”
Author Minerva took a step back. “What’s that?”
“This isn’t the real world.”
Fictional Minerva took out a .38 Colt revolver with “Chekhov” written in red paint pen down the barrel. Author Minerva put up her hands, but her fictional self didn’t miss.
REMINDER: Everything here is my personal opinion for my own personal style of working as of this date. My process is constantly changing and evolving and I don’t ever EVER expect that what works for me will necessarily work for anyone else. I only write my experiences because I’ve found the experiences of others to be useful in developing my own process.
Yes! I need that many inks. Cause… reasons.
An unforeseen side effect of doing these posts is that I end up putting ink in one new pen a week. Well, I need to use up the ink in some of those pens before I fill any more right now. So this week I’m going to talk about my inks and notebooks. I pick my inks on one quality – I like the color. That’s it. The whole thing. Do different inks behave differently? Sure, a little… but so far I haven’t run into any that were a major problem so I pick based on color. I try to use colors of ink totally unlike the ones I write in at work so there’s a differentiation of visual inputs. I’m a very visual person so it helps me switch brain gears.
Noodler’s InksReverse side of normal notebook paper of inks to left.
Noodler’s Violet next to box.
I like Noodler’s Ink quite a bit. It’s a good value. They fill the bottles REALLY REALLY FULL, so always set them on a flat surface to open. Even in my most used colors I haven’t managed to put a major dent in the bottle. I own one “bulletproof” color and I don’t like it quite as much as the regular ones. It seems to stain ME worse than other inks and you only get a 1/3rd as much ink. I mean, it’s nice that it doesn’t wash off the paper once dry… but I’ve found that isn’t a major thing for me. It also tends to bleed through the paper more than the regular ink. The Apache Sunset came through the paper because I used a lot of it to show the gradient in the color, but I barely swabbed the Hunter on there.
J. Herbin, Pilot, and Pelikan inksReverse of normal notebook paper of ink swabs to the left
I own a bunch more J. Herbin colors in cartridge form, and I find it a well-behaved ink that comes in pretty colors. I swabbed the Anniversary Red pretty hard because supposedly the hematite flecks in the ink show up on paper, but I can never get them to. It is, however, a really gorgeous red. Pelikan Turquoise makes a really consistent color on the page. I keep meaning to try it in some of my finer nibbed pens cause I think it would work well for them. The bottom color there is the most expensive ink I own and it has one of the neater bottles (its the wide one in the middle up there) which has a little pen-tip reservoir in the bottom so you can get at every drop.
Oooo pretty swabsNot bad for opening and swabbing all those bottles, plus the streak on my index finger is from a work-related sharpie
Notebooks
Clockwise from Upper Left: Evernote Moleskine, Pen and Ink, Moleskine Lined, Moleskine Extra-Small in yellow, Moleskine Volant Notebook Extra-Small
I like small notebooks. I do have some larger notebooks but I mostly use those for research and private journaling. Stuff I don’t want cluttering up my writing notebooks with. The extra small notebooks up there are for repetitive things I like to keep track of in one place. The Evernote notebook has been my main notebook for the last umpteen months and has a sticker on the cover to symbolize that it has no room for new things. I still have a couple stories I’m working on in there, but I can’t start any new projects in it. The Pen and Ink is probably my favorite pocket notebook (I’ll talk more about that in a bit as that’s my new notebook right now). The slightly larger 5×7 notebook I have kicking around is the one I do most of my pen tests in and I try to sit down and write out things that are cluttering up my head before I start to write.
The Extra-Small notebook with writing. This is my short story ranking book. The glow-in the dark skulls on the cover were the extra nail wraps from doing my nails at Rainforest. I thought they looked too cool to just toss out.The green Volant Extra-Small, This is my 40 bags in 40 days mini-notebook. Nail polish this week is Zoya Anja with a top coat of LA Colors Star Light glitter
My Evernote Notebook before I put the sticker on the cover. I use pocket notebooks, I use Evernote, it seemed worth trying. I liked the Premium Evernote it came with, was not overly thrilled with the notebook itself. I’m not a fan of the embossed cover in general. You can also see my project flag markers.flag markers for different stories at various places throughout the notebook
Adding flag markers to my in-process notebook has been a recent thing. I quite like it and suspect I will continue doing it into the future. Especially since I already employ this method at work in my accession catalog, so it feels quite natural. I’m a huge fan of color coding, so each story is a different color.
Table of Contents with page numbers of where stuff is.
Since I write all my drafts longhand, I have to transcribe everything. I found this cheap stand somewhere and it has been a lifesaver.
I really wish I knew where I got this. I think it was advertised as a cheap tablet stand.With A notebook propped up. So much easier to transcribe this way.
While I’m actually composing I’ll use my lap desk or this handy dandy mini-clipboard I found in the $1 bins at Target one time.
Stickers are from Woot
When I open a new notebook, the first thing I do is number the pages (unless it comes pre-numbered). This allows me to keep a table of contents of where everything is. It also helps me track my word count and keeps me accountable. I know that each page in a pocket notebook is about 100 words in my handwriting. So I can count ahead for what will be the minimum word count I need to do for that day and circle that page number so I know that I’m keeping pace. I have a couple super super fine tipped gel pens I keep specifically for numbering notebooks. This is partially so the numbers don’t take up much room, and also so the page numbers are a different color that I’ll be writing with.
Pen and Ink Lined Journal. Pocket Sized.
I don’t remember how I found the Pen and Ink Lined Journal. Probably I was looking for Moleskine and found this instead. It is pretty much entirely comparable with the Moleskine Pocket in every way INCLUDING price (sometimes it is even cheaper). There are some other notebooks that are just as nice, but are several dollars more expensive. I am a cheap bastard. I want the best product for the lowest price. This notebook is it, as far as I’m concerned. There are cheaper notebooks with less pages and good paper, but I like this size.
The reverse side of a Pen and Ink page written on in fountain pen ink (Noodler’s Red-Black) Some bleed thru but not bad.Reverse side of a Moleskine Page. Note the stronger bleed thru.Pen and Ink Notebook in my hand.
In summary: I like non-standard colored ink. Pocket notebooks are where it’s at. I continue to be a cheap ass.
Enough of my friends have been trying or espousing the standing desk, that I decided to give it a shot. I had some spacing crates I’d been using to boost up some bins in my laundry room, so I just grabbed those to stack on my existing desk to boost my monitor and keyboard to standing level. I mean I’m curious, but not buying new furniture curious.
I’ve been using my Macguyvered standing desk for about a week now. I really like it. More than I thought I would. It seems to improve not only my chronic back pain, but my daily activity level. I wear a fitbit and my step count has gone up at least 1-2k depending on how long I’m working at it.
I haven’t had great luck at doing really focused work for long periods of time while standing, but I find the majority of what I do in front of the computer isn’t very focused. I do my fiction drafting longhand, so I’m usually talking to people or doing research. And if I need to focus on the computer I can take my laptop elsewhere.
I’ve got a tall stool I can rest my feet on or lean against for rests, but I don’t really find myself sitting on it. More importantly, I have a good gel anti-fatigue mat to stand on. I stole it from my kitchen, but I don’t think the kitchen is getting it back. I’ve also decided I prefer shoes on to shoes off mostly because they distribute my weight across more of the gel mat.
Still trying out various keyboard and mouse positioning since nothing seems to be perfect that way yet. So far so good, though I miss having more desk real estate to put stuff on. I’ll try to update in a few weeks to see how things continue to evolve.
Do you or have you used a standing desk? How does/did it work for you?
The phone on Minerva’s desk rang. She picked it up. “Hello?”
“Hey, another light burned out in the gallery. Can you bring one of the replacement bulbs down?” asked her boss.
“Sure, no problem. Be right down.”
Minerva hung up the phone and walked around the large cabinet that the back made one wall of her desk area, blocking her off from the rest of the workroom. She opened the middle cupboard and rummaged around looking for the box of replacement light bulbs for the gallery lights. She pulled out the box labeled “bulbs” and noticed another strange box behind it. She crouched down and realized it was a machine of some kind, its switch switched to on.
“Huh,” said Minerva. She set the bulbs on the table behind her and grabbed the large box-like machine. It didn’t move. She sighed, grabbed the bulbs and ran them downstairs. When she returned, she wiggled at the box, still unable to pull it out of the cupboard. It was stuck fast, its metal stand somehow stuck against the painted wooden shelf. Probably had rubber non-skid pads that had chemically reacted with the paint.
Minerva got a flashlight and peered around the device, finally finding an accession number on the side: 91.348.1
She found the ledger book for items donated between 1987-1998 and looked up the item:
Today I’m going to talk about the very first fountain pen I bought myself the Lamy Al-star (Goulet, Amazon, Jet Pens). The Al-Star and the Safari are very similar with the Safari being a little smaller and the Al-Star having an aluminum casing. I won’t lie, I bought this pen because it is a sexy pen and the color is even more impressive in person.
Lamy Al-Star
The pen won’t roll off your table (though I’ve managed to drop it, so there are a few dents and scratches on this one).
folding knife and tic tacs for scale. No idea why I picked these items.
This is a pretty standard-sized pen in length, but is a little wider around than a lot of pens.
It has this cool little porthole in the side so you can see how much ink you have left. This one currently has no ink in it. I use this pen with bottled ink.
Lamy in pieces showing converter.
It does require a proprietary converter so I’d recommend picking one up at the same time. So here’s a few pictures of how to fill a pen with bottled ink. If you’re really curious, YouTube is always a good place to look for how-to’s.
Step one: Put converter into pen. Nailpolish: Sally Hansen Triple Shine Fanta-sea. Been really big on clear polish with glitter recently.Step Two: Dip pen into ink until the nib is covered. You will over-dip, don’t freak. It wipes off. Have tissue or a rag handy.Step Three: twist the converter to suck ink up into the pen. I usually have to squish it back out and re-do it to get it totally filled. Tap the pen against the side of the bottle to get rid of extra ink. Wipe off pen from where you over-dipped. Usually manage to stain your fingers somehow. Screw pen back together.
This is a very nice pen. It writes REALLY well. It doesn’t write as fast as last week’s pen, but it is smooth and steady.
Ink is Noodler’s Red-Black. Nib is Medium
It is a little big and I do find my hand becoming fatigued after awhile.
Pen without cap in hand
Oh another thing, it has an ergonomic grip which forces you to hold the pen properly. This is good and bad. Good, cause it makes sure you hold the pen properly, bad if you don’t normally use that exact grip.
Personally I think it is way too heavy and long to use the pen with the cap on it.
The Good
sexy
impressive (people notice it)
writes REALLY nice
ergonomic grip
solid without being really heavy
can use a converter
The Bad
ergonomic grip
proprietary cartridge
proprietary converter
slightly more expensive pen
aluminum can dent and scratch pretty easy
I have not had this one leak, but the cap feels like it MIGHT fall off in certain situations
I will admit I’m just not a fan of the pocket clip on this pen. I think it would be even sexier without it
Overall grade: B+
I love the look and feel of this pen. I wish it was just a tiny bit lighter and thinner (I suspect I’d like the Lamy Safari). I did carry this as my every day pen for awhile (hence the dents and scratches) but prefer to use less expensive pens for that now.
I was talking with my friend Brian the other day and sending him scary pictures of terrible toys, like you do. Which reminded me I had the worst toy as a kid. Someone gifted me with a red felt jester doll with a Punch and Judy puppet head (like above) that had wires inside the body so you could pose it to sit on a shelf. Someone thought it would be a great idea to put this doll on the highest shelf in my room so I wouldn’t play with it. This shelf happened to be above my nightlight. The doll had curly cue toed shoes and those grotesque facial features which cast a human-sized shadow on my wall each night.
I’d burrow under my covers and turn away from where the shadow leered on my wall. I slept in a captain’s bed several feet off the floor at the far end of the house. I could get out of bed without a problem by slipping down over the side, but I had to get a running start to get into bed by myself, which was something I didn’t feel I could do safely because of all the monsters in the dark. All of the monsters who were themselves scared of the jester shadow doll and would not go any higher than the floor level.
I’d try to fall asleep as fast as I could so I wouldn’t be asleep when the doll came to life. Which actually worked pretty good, until I developed insomnia. I want to say I was somewhere between 6 and 8 when I stopped being able to fall asleep at night and I’d just lay there and stare at the shadow that sometimes seemed to move. Eventually this became a major problem, and when I begged for the doll to go away I was just told to “close my eyes”.
It’s hard to keep your eyes closed when you’re pretty sure the doll is leering at you and its shadow is always in a slightly different place on the wall at night. I’d try to get it down during the day, but it was just out of my reach even on a step stool.
One night, I hid my wiffle bat under the covers (I think this had to do with nightmares more than the doll, but I don’t remember for sure) and while laying there awake, I realized that while I couldn’t reach it… I could probably knock the doll off the shelf. So I crept to the end of my bed, and stood yellow wiffle bat in hand, leaning out over the gap between the end of the bed and the wall. I missed a bunch and I almost fell off the end of the bed a couple of times, but eventually I managed to knock it over, then off the shelf.
The shape of the shadow it cast as it tumbled from the shelf… I… I dropped the plastic bat and dove under the covers and didn’t come out until morning.
The doll wasn’t quite so scary in the morning. Ugly, yes, but clearly just a doll. I shoved it deep into the cupboard under my bed and the next time I was given a trash bag to fill for donation, I hid the terrible doll in the bag and pretended it had never existed.
With the doll gone, I realized I could read my library books at the foot of my bed by the light of my nightlight and ceased worrying so much about not being able to sleep.
MINERVA ZIMMERMAN 