Sugar Moosies

18 January 2002

Crossing the Atlantic gave my ancestors a name change, from Peterson to Lingon, chosen because of the berries they grew on their farm, lingonberries. The guy at Ellis Island had never heard of lingonberries, so he gave it a different spelling, Lingen. Well, evidently when you go back across the Atlantic, enough people have heard of the berries to change it back again, because I've gotten several WIHA subs from Britain and Northern Ireland in the last few days that started "Dear Ms. Lingon." If it was any other misspelling, I would be profoundly annoyed. (Not annoyed enough to reject the stories -- that would be silly. Still annoyed, though.) But I find this one a little charming.

I am enough of a geek that I not only have a spreadsheet tracking my submissions, acceptances, etc., but I have set it up to graph the submission data. What can I say. Not enough numbers in my life lately, I guess. (David's solution to this problem was that I should get into baseball history. Hah. I should have stayed in physics, if I wanted good numbers.)

So I finished "The Butler's Black Arts" yesterday, and I will never, ever again have to write a short story in the style of Wodehouse. You can quote me on that, I don't mind. If you run into me at a con when I'm 60 and I have written so much as one more Wodehousian story, you may greet me with "What ho!" and tease me mercilessly.

I'm still waffling on what to do with today. We're having some people from the writing group over tonight, so I need to clean up the place and make some food. Timprov is sleeping today, and Mark will be at work until midafternoon. Whatever is left to do is left for me to do.

I did start yesterday with the sugar moosies. Oatmeal sugar moosies, to be exact. Also some hearts and stars. I discovered that Mark's train cookie cutter is not well suited to oatmeal sugar cookie dough: too many little ins and outs. Santa Claus had found me moose cookie cutters for in my stocking, so I used those with Great Grandma Lingen's oatmeal sugar cookie recipe. Yum. I do believe that the heart is the ideal cookie-cutter shape, though. It applies to all kinds of holidays, and it's recognizable as a non-blob without having all kinds of little bits and bobs to worry about. But the moose do look very good.

So I know that it won't take me all day to finish cleaning and make food. My choices after that stuff is done are to relax (anybody believe that one?), to push through another story (probably "Glass Wind" or maybe the one in Aachen), or to do the little household things that keep stacking up on the "to do" list but aren't absolutely vital to have done at any given time. I suppose I could mix the latter two and write part of a story and do a few of the household extras.

I think I'm going to remove "Saturn: fix lighter" from the "to do" list. It's been on there since a good long time before we moved to Concord, and we don't seem to have any motivation to do it. I think when we move, we will, because the only thing we use the lighter in the Saturn for is to charge the cell phone, and we have no need to do that under current circumstances. But it's just clutter on the list, mostly. I don't think any of us actually believes it'll get done.

Yesterday Ben sent me this link with the comment that he thought of me. Now that is friendship right there: getting e-mail that, hey, the corpse-eating lizards made me think of you! And not even having to stop and think whether he means something good by it, because of course he does. (Figuring out what was more of a challenge. But that's okay.)

So. Off I go to wash the floors and take out the trash and dust the books. Tra la. And maybe to write stories about the Snow Queen and olfactory hallucinations. Who knows.

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