Author Archives: Anaea Lay

About Anaea Lay

Consultant, Project Manager, Realtor - those are the boring things. Books, writing, politics, food, travel, books, people, science, parrots, and books...that's me.

Ground Chicken Lettuce Wraps

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On the theory that with none of us travelling regularly for work anymore, that we are lazy creatures who nonetheless like fresh consumable plant things, and that having several weeks in the summer best described as OMG ALL THE SQUASH, we signed up for CSA box this summer.  For those of you not in the trendy local food scene, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  Basically, you pay ahead of time for a summer’s worth of produce, and then every week a farm drops off a box full of whatever’s fresh that week, leaving you with the sacred mission to consume it all before it goes to waste.  Truly, this is a challenge we can meet.

Maybe.

First week in, we’re already behind.  We get deliveries on Wednesday and here we are Tuesday with  a completely untouched bag of arugula.  And a lot of cilantro.  And we didn’t really start on the radishes until yesterday.

That’s not the point.  What is the point is what I did on Saturday to both put a dent in our produce, and get me dinner faster than the 4+ my original plan of pot roast was going to take

IMG_6204

That is a plate of ground chicken.  I threw a package of chicken thighs into a food processor with a roughly chopped onion, a few cloves of garlic, a dash of salt, and some “Chicken curry” seasoning mix I found in the spice cupboard.  Then I processed it until it looked like ground up chicken, and sauteed it in a cast iron skillet.  It took two batches.  That was okay – I was juggling several things and having multiple batches just meant my timing wasn’t utterly borked.IMG_6205

Among the things I was juggling was boiling broth for Israeli couscous, and chopping up the last snow turnip, plus all the turnip greens.  I didn’t do anything special to the couscous – it was most there as a starchy filler.  I cooked the turnip in the same skillet I’d done the chicken in, with the added bonus of pouring all the juice from the chicken plate back into the skillet.  I’ve never cooked a turnip before, but quick research indicated they’re tasty raw or cooked, so I wasn’t too worried about undercooking.  The greens I threw into the same skillet again (I loathe doing dishes) and seasoned with a dash of vinegar (hey, it’s good on beet greens!).  IMG_6208

As unimpressive as this bowl looks, this turned out to be the runaway best part of the dish.  I threw some soy sauce into a bowl.  Then, because this is how we roll, some sriracha.  Then a bit of honey.  Some vinegar.  Fish sauce.  I think that’s everything?  Really, I tossed in whatever looked good in that particular cabinet.  This was the last thing I had to do before eating, and I’d spent all day running from hither and yon with clients who want a hobby farm.  I was hungry.IMG_6211

This was rather extraordinarily too much food for two people, which was all I had for dinner on Saturday night.  That’s about 1/3 of that kind of lettuce we got in our CSA box last Wednesday.  It was the right amount for feeding two people.  The turnip was also portioned correctly.  There was too much chicken, couscous and sauce.IMG_6215This is what the wrap looked like assembled.  Actually, this is the only wrap that looked that nice, since most of the lettuce leaves were too small or torn to make good wraps.  But this one, let me assure you, was mega-tasty.

On its own, the chicken mixture was a bit bland – I should have added more curry seasoning and also probably tossed in a bit of soy sauce (and maybe a dash of vinegar, for consistency).  However, when I put away the leftovers, I just poured the sauce over the chicken.  That was brilliance prompted by laziness, and the leftover chicken is much, much improved over the original iteration.

I predict lots of pictures of vegetables coming up.

 

Podcast: Longfin’s Daughters

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I am a known sucker for stories about sibling relationships.  Especially functional sibling relationships.  I blame my little sister.  That said, this week‘s podcast features an awesome trio of sisters being functional and supportive.  Also, eels. Mildly creepy eels.  Also known as the best kind of eels.

And if that’s not enough of a reason to go check out the podcast, then do it because it’s my birthday this week and I’m another year closer to anybody taking me seriously.  Someday I will be thirty and have credibility as an adult, or so I’m told.  Until then, listen to the podcast.

Sentient Domain: Chapter 24

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This chapter is eligible for winning bonuses in the Sentient Domain Game. An index of all relevant posts can be found here. 

Pavi Valshorn’s body ached, but she didn’t care. She’d been in contact with Mike for days without dropping a single packet. The nanite interface gave them everything of the instant, intimate contact the chip in her brain stem had provided, without any of the junk in the signal that made it worthless. Besides, it was nice, nicer than Pavi had time to measure, to be able to share space with her best friend.

<That planet smells weird,> Mike said. Continue reading →

Spamtastic Promotion Fail

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Last week, while I was in the depths of digging myself out of a massive to do list, I received the following email.

Hey [My Real First Name],
Grammarly recently gave its 3 million users the opportunity to nominate their favorite blogging author, and I’m very pleased to announce that you were one of the nominees selected to receive a blog-post sponsorship in the form of a $25 Amazon gift voucher. Grammarly is an automated online proofreader that points out and explains those pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes that are bound to find their way into your first draft. Think of us as that second pair of eyes that can spare you the frustrating cost of hiring a proofreader.
To receive your gift voucher, all we need from you is a quick sentence about Grammarly in your next blog post. Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next blog post so I can send you all the details you need in time. If you’d like to try the premium version of our proofreader for free, let me know and I’ll make it happen. :)
Cheers and happy writing,

Nick

P.S. Let me know if you ever find yourself in foggy San Francisco. I’d love to buy you coffee!

I read through this and, I must confess, my immediate response was, “I’m not above prostitution, but if this guy thinks I sell for $25, he’s nuts.” But I wasn’t the only one to get this email – several writers did, and several of them were quite annoyed. I have just enough traffic here that it’s plausible that what he says is true, if unlikely. Some of the other people who got the exact same email do not get traffic to their blogs. This email is a lie, and even if there actually is an Amazon voucher forthcoming, the whole thing is basically an SEO ploy to improve their google rankings. I’m not stupid, nor am I particularly gullible. I don’t appreciate being approached as if I am.

Last Thursday, I also happened to be particularly cranky, for a number of things not this guy’s fault, but some of which did involve the other people he was bothering. Dude, the SF writer community has not been having collective fun the last few weeks, and you’re bugging us with this bullshit? I can’t fix the bigger stuff. I can’t even talk about the bigger stuff without cussing and having to point out how the sentence I just said, while a true representation of how I feel, is unfair and ignores important details. When you do that for every sentence, it gets hard to talk about. You know what’s easy? Baiting the spammer.

Hi Nick,
I have a few questions.
1) You absolutely won’t be in my next blog post – my content for Fridays and Mondays are fixed and I’m not changing my schedule for this.
2) Do you have a link to the contest? I’ve never heard of Grammerly before and would like to see more of what this is about.
3) How many people won this?
4) Any sentence about Grammerly?
Best,
[My Real First Name]

I did go to their website before writing back. It’s a real product. They’ve got a real thing going on there. The problem is, I never pay a proof reader. And, frankly, this is obvious if you read my blog. My stuff gets read by professional proof reader when somebody else has paid me. Otherwise, it’s spell check and my meager copy editing skills or bust. Marketing this product to me is based on an utterly false premise. And, frankly, it sticks in my craw that by sending out these sorts of emails, he’s potentially creating the impression in newb writers that they ought to be paying for proof reading. You know what? I am a sloppy, sloppy copy editor. My rule of thumb is generally that if I catch your errors, you’ve performed badly and if I don’t, well, that’s pretty meaningless, actually. And I’ve made eleven fiction sales at professional rates. It’s my job to be passably competent on this front. It’s the magazine’s job to hire a proof reader.

Hey Anaea,

We care an aweful lot about our language and want to support people that are helping us keep it alive. To find them, we asked our users in an email campaign to anonymously nominate authors who were inspiring others to read and write. Of those nominations, we picked those we thought were especially deserving of our support and contacted them via email. Sorry if our initial message was a little unclear.

The company footing the bill would be Grammarly in San Francisco. We make a really good automated online proofreader used by over 3 million people, you should check it out!

Here’s what you need to do to get your gift voucher:
Paste the following text into the top of your next blog post: “I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because [insert clever/funny reason here].” (e.g. “because time spent proofreading could be time spent writing”)
Publish the post on your blog and email me the link.
We’ll send you your $25 gift voucher via email within 72h.
The best clever/funny reason for using Grammarly each month wins a $100 Amazon gift voucher!

Does that make sense? When do you think you’ll be publishing your next post?

Cheers,
Nick

Oh, they care and aweful lot about language, do they? Hey, even I caught that one. Mostly because spell check yells at me for it all the time. Does he not have red squiggly lines in his email composition window? Does Grammarly kill the red squiggle lines?

Also, dear god, I hope I’m not inspiring people to write. There are enough writers in the world. Half of them should find a new hobby. If you need me to inspire you to write, may I suggest knitting, instead? I’ve seen slush piles. They destroy what little faith in humanity I ever manage to muster.

Back to our dear friend Nick and his awefully generous desire to give me $25 if only I’ll lend my classy little blog here to his dreams of page 1 rankings. Notice his attention to detail, and how he’s suddenly switched to using the name attached to the email address rather than the one he pulled from the records about the site owner (I’m guessing that’s how he got my real name), even though I signed my email to him with my real name. This is a marketing guy with big ambition and small attention to detail.

The best part? This email I got fifteen minutes later.

Hi <Real Name>,
Self-publishing takes a tremendous amount of courage and inspires people to care about writing. We at Grammarly appreciate that and would be honored to sponsor your next blog post with a $15 Amazon gift voucher. We’re confident that a mention of our brand on your blog will help spread the word about us within the community.
In case you haven’t heard of us, Grammarly is an automated online proofreader that points out and explains those pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes that are bound to find their way into your first draft. Think of us as that second pair of eyes that can spare you the frustrating cost of hiring a proofreader. If you’d like to join our 3 million users and try the premium version of our proofreader for free, let me know and I’ll make it happen. :)
Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate homeschooling post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time.
Cheers,
Nick
P.S. Let me know if you ever find yourself in foggy San Francisco; I’d love to grab some coffee. :)

Oh goody. Now I’m a courageous self-publisher! Just what I’ve always wanted!! I mean, I thought I was putting my book up because I’m too damn lazy to submit to editors or make a proper ebook, but apparently it’s so I can bravely become Spam bait for people who think I write about homeschooling?

This guy didn’t even cross reference his lists of different blogs to make sure he didn’t use two approaches for the same people. As somebody who does a fair bit of marketing in her day job, I’m a smidge offended at the laziness demonstrated here. Dude, you allegedly have access to a bit of software that can replace a human proofreader, but you can’t throw your database into a spreadsheet and run a duplicate entry check?

I’m disappointed in the quality of human spam scum these days.

I asked around and tried to find anybody willing to confess to having nominated me for this honor. There were no takers, just more people who’ve gotten this spam.

Here’s the real problem. If I were going to properly go into self publishing, this might be an appealing product. But now that I’ve heard about it in this fashion, there is no chance in hell I am going to use it. Or recommend it. I’m not even putting their name in the post title just to limit the bit of google boosting griping about them does. If this company wanted to reach out to writers and get the word around the SF community about their product, there are about a dozen better ways I could think of for them to accomplish that, and without spending much more than whatever their planned outlay of vouchers is. If they want those ideas, they’re welcome to ask for them.

But they should remember that my consulting rates start at $120/hour.

Podcast: Collateral Memory

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You know how there’s always something a little creepy under the surface of kids games when you look at them?  This week’s story digs into that in a really interesting way.  You should check it out.

We’re halfway through the year on the podcast, and I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.  That said, I’m also a glutton for feedback.  So, now that we’re at the halfway mark for the first year, anybody with opinions about what we’re doing right and what we could be doing better is hereby strongly encouraged to share them.  I have the minor ambition of making sure the Strange Horizons podcast is the best thing ever, hands down, pure awesome sauce spectacular.  Help a gal achieve her ambition, ‘kay?

And if you haven’t been listening, maybe this is a good week to start, so you can form an opinion to share?

Sentient Domain: Chapter 23

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This chapter is eligible for winning bonuses in the Sentient Domain Game. An index of all relevant posts can be found here.

Rita watched Kempus on the view screen as it loomed large before them. It hung in the blackness, a ball of rich blue ocean coated with striations of white cloud. Rita hadn’t seen it since she left, and she’d been certain she’d never come back. It wasn’t until this moment, as she looked down on the planet, that she realized how home-sick she’d been for it. She could already feel the salty wind that blew over the breezeway between the masters’ lodge and the student residences, smell the oily gaspum fruit hanging heavy and ripe along the walkways. She was desperately grateful only Linda had caught her cheating.

“Shit!” Linda said over the speakers. “Everybody strap in, now.” Continue reading →

A Year Later: Different Room, Same Story

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If you think you know what set this off, you’re probably right.

There are rooms I don’t go into.

People live in rooms.  Sometimes they step from one to another to go see other parts of the world, but they’ll always be back to their own rooms, the four walls that hide most of them from most of everything else.  We wander around the world with these rooms.  Sometimes the walls are permeable, and we bump into each other and for a while, we’re in the same room.  Or we bump into each other and fall into the wrong room for a bit.  We might back out and go home.  We might stay.  For a while, it might even be okay that we stay.  The owner of the room might want that. They might not. Sometimes, the people can say, “Hey, get out of my room,” and that’s enough.  Sometimes they can’t, maybe because they’d stepped out of the room for a moment and now they have dozens of unexpected guests.  Or maybe a guest won’t take the hint and go.  Or won’t leave even when asked.

Sometimes, you see somebody in their room, trying to ask all the overstaying guests to go, and you step in to help.  Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed, too, so you try to combine efforts.  Sometimes you get an entire complex of rooms belonging to people held up past their bedtime.  They’re cranky and tired and would really like to be polite, generous hosts, but that’s just past their capacity anymore because they’re already past their limits.  You’re still only asking for five minutes, but it’s not about just you anymore.  Five minutes and five minutes and five minutes.  Lost sleep and stressed patience and your five minutes now carries the weight of hours upon hours of imposition.  They get cranky.  They throw you out.  They ask you not to come back.

Even though it was just five minutes.

Sometimes you look at the tired, cranky people, and you decide to help.  Maybe you’re one of them, but have enough energy to chip in anyway.  Maybe you just feel bad for them.  So you take it on.  You join the fight.  They whine, and complain, backbite and get distracted by little side issues or things that don’t help or don’t really matter, but you let it go.  You’re in their rooms, you’re there to help, they need your help, and, ultimately, this helps you, too.  You have a later bedtime, but it’s not like you never have inconsiderate house guests from time to time.  Your room is nice.  It’s bound to happen.  Helping them, really, it helps you, too.

Except, it doesn’t work.  You work hard, you do everything right.  You work harder than some of the people in the rooms, you take on the nastier jobs, and you let them slide because hey, they’re tired, you aren’t.  Not yet.

You lose.

You lose because the people you were trying to help didn’t do what they should have in order to win.  You lose because they were so busy whining and complaining that they didn’t really ever get into the fight.  You lose because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much five minutes after five minutes adds up, it’s Just Five Minutes.  You lose because you weren’t ever going to win.

Now you’re tired.  And you’re cranky.  And you’re surrounded by tired, cranky people who still can’t get the house guests to leave, and aren’t really even trying anymore.  They’re just talking about how much they’d like them to.  Repeating slogans from the fight.

You pass old graffiti that says, “Support early bedtime,” and where it used to make you smile and feel like you had support, like you were getting somewhere, now you just want to tear it apart and set it on fire.  What the hell were they doing, wasting time on graffiti, when they could have been helping?  And why is some of it fresh, new, when it’s been a year since you lost?  Don’t they understand that now you’re worn out and tired and you’ve locked your room because you don’t want to deal with anybody and it’s their fault for needing help and failing to use it?

And why is it that, here we are, a year later, and there’s no retrospective, no analysis of what went wrong where and what’s going to be done about it.  No apologies.  No blame.  It’s like the fight didn’t happen, and the people still playing soldier are happy to move on to something else while everybody else just shrugs and says, “Oh well.  Let’s bitch about five minute some more.”  Or worse, they’re acting like the fight is still happening and blithely ignoring the part where THEY LOST.

Fuck your five minutes.  Fuck your righteous indignation and your platitudes about this and that.  Fuck your stupid early bed time and your utterly pathetic weakness about enforcing it.  You could have had it better and you dropped the ball so just shut the ever loving fuck up and get the hell out of my room.

There’s another fight brewing.  Different people.  Different rooms.  Same structure.  Same pattern.  Same options open to everybody.  Same potential for things to get better, for people to finally get some rest, for the well-intentioned guests to learn and the malicious ones to accept their exile.

There are rooms I don’t go into.

Right now, that’s all of them.

Podcast: Jinki and the Paradox

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Weird kids and math.  That really ought to be all you need to know to go check out this week’s podcast.  Also, neatness with Alice in Wonderland and meta-play with trickster tropes.

For any of you keeping track of the behind-the-scenes chronicles of the Strange Horizons podcast, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that Idi and I appear to have reached a truce on the podcast.  Now that the weather is nice enough for her to go onto the porch, she is quite happy to nap in my office while I’m recording.  If you need to ask how the one thing relates to the other, I suspect you’ve never owned a cat.

Now stop reading silly things about my cat.  Go listen to the podcast.

Rea

Sentient Domain: Chapter 22

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This chapter is eligible for winning bonuses in the Sentient Domain Game. An index of all relevant posts can be found here.

Rita put her feet up on the console as she settled in on the bridge of the Whimper’s Revenge. Aliph and Bett were having a reunion with the mess, Pavi was napping and Donegal was stowing some last minute supplies.

“Welcome back, boss,” Linda said.

“Thanks, Linda.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m in denial, so yeah, for now.”

“How long will the denial last?” Linda asked.

“No idea.”

“That’s fine. We can talk, if you need to.”

“I know.” Rita sat up and checked their status reports. “Let’s get going, okay?”

“Everybody is stowed. Starting engines.” Continue reading →

In Lieu of a WisCon Con Report

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WisCon was great, as usual, but also rather exhausting since I failed to take the weekend off – I just got my work done super early, before con things.  Rather than write up a vague and incoherent retelling of things you either were there for and probably remember better, or weren’t there for and probably don’t really care about, I’ll share an anecdote to illustrate how awesome, yet exhausting, WisCon was.

My first post-con client appointment was at 4pm Monday, so I pretty much went straight from post-con lunch to the appointment.  I was even marginally prepared for it, with almost fully half of the printed material I would normally have brought!  Fortunately, these clients have reached the, “Oh god, our car is filling up with our Realtor’s over-preparedness,” stage, so they took this as a blessing rather than a sign that I hadn’t organized my day well enough to drop into the office before meeting them.

And it was a great showing.  They like the neighborhood.  They like the yard.  They like the house.  They’re in a part of town I know as well as if I lived there.  This is because I live there.  I’m positively overflowing with tips about easiest bike routes to the library, or the Southwest commuter trail, or out to Verona.  And restaurant recommendations.  And directions to the parks with the best swing sets.  I am made of Realtor competence and know how, and it’s awesome because these clients want to buy this house, and oh god we’ve been here forever and they’re looking at bedrooms just one more time.

Interesting fact about houses built in the sixties in my part of town: they have laundry shoots.  Not the big drop your toddler down them laundry shoots you’d think of, but narrow ones that are great for not letting dirty dish rags drip their way down the steps to the washing machine, and which your cat, no matter how hard she tries, cannot fit into.  When I have clients shopping this neighborhood, the laundry shoot becomes a running gag after about the second house.

“Where,” one half of my very thorough clients asks, “Does it come out?”

I’m in hyper-competent Realtor mode, so even though I have a sense of, given where we are in the house, where the outlet ought to be in the basement, I decide to go confirm it and have the answer for super certain.  I go to the basement.  I stare at the ceiling.  I look all over the basement.  The whole basement.  Even the parts that don’t possibly line up even a little bit with the laundry shoot.  The outlet ought to be somewhere more or less near the furnace, but I don’t see anything.  I bet the piping to the furnace is obscuring it.  So I decide to do the obvious, logical thing.

I go upstairs.  I open the laundry shoot.  I consider my resources.  Cell phone, sunglasses, Magic Key* (my nickname for the thingie that lets me into houses), wallet.  The only thing on that list unlikely to be broken by a drop that far is my wallet which I am sensibly reluctant to risk losing.  So I expand my search parameters.  Shirt.  Pants. Shoes.  Bingo, shoes!  Shoes are sturdy, and I can go barefoot without offending social mores or professional standards.  I drop a shoe down the laundry shoot.

The shoe does not hit the basement floor.

The laundry shoot does not have an outlet.

“Oh, that was a bad idea,” I say.

“What?” asks the observant half of my thorough clients.

So now I have to explain that in my quest to ensure I have full and complete, accurate information about everything they want to know, I have performed science, badly, and now my shoe is trapped somewhere in the null space between the upstairs entrance to the laundry shoot and the ceiling of the basement.  And now that I’m thinking a little more intelligently, I’m using the flashlight built into my magic key to look in the laundry shoot and see how far out of reach my shoe is.  Had I done this earlier, I’d have still learned that the laundry shoot has no outlet, and I’d still have both my shoes.  I took this opportunity to remind my clients that we’re only a week into the 30 days before they can unilaterally cancel our agency relationship.

There was a lot of giggling.  There was a deployment of smart phones with flashlight apps peering into ceiling rafters answered by plaintive cries of, “I can see light coming in from somewhere, but where?”  There was an sad little voice composing an awkward email in the back of my head. “Dear Listing agent: I am a moron and have left my shoe trapped in your clients’ lovely home.  It’s a nice shoe, but will bear up under its isolation from its companion well.  My buyers would like to buy this house.  Please don’t hold my unabashed idiocy against them.  They’re very nice people, really.”

In the end, I removed a ceiling tile from the (very nice) half bath and was met with a shoe crashing into my face.  Never has a Realtor been happier to have a shoe smash her face.  Truly.

That is how tired I was after WisCon.  And WisCon was worth it.   That is all you need to know.