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People often ask me what I think about Valentine’s Day and I think they expect me to go “ack! p’tui! I hate pink and gooey sentiment and cheap chocolate!”

While all those things are true, though, I love true sentiments, excellent chocolate, and the fact that we HAVE A HOLIDAY SPECIFICALLY ABOUT LOVE. Why wouldn’t I love that? We have how many holidays that are about war? Death? A bunch. We have exactly one holiday which is expressly about love and about appreciating the people you love, and that’s today.

Now, while I think it would be best if people were always so open and free with their emotions that saying “I love you” every single day would be a matter of course, I know not everyone lives in the utopia that I do. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say or when. There are times when love hurts. But on Valentine’s Day everyone has permission to say it, to express it. Some people need that permission. I don’t begrudge them a holiday that gives it to them.

Yes, I’m the one who told my high school boyfriends that if they ever brought me flowers I was breaking up with them immediately. Why? What I told them, actually, was this: 1) I wasn’t a “girly girl” and if they were going to treat me like one we should not be dating. 2) If they ever felt they had to use flowers as a way to say something, anything, that they felt they couldn’t just TELL ME, then the relationship was already lost. So it wasn’t the flowers themselves I objected to. It was the stupid ways that flowers were often used that I didn’t want to be a party to.

You’ll note I never told them not to get me chocolate, though. I’m not crazy.

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Since I often forget to take pictures as we go along (though my iPhone and Twitter have made that less of a problem than it used to be) I asked guests at the meal to take pictures, too! Here are some, including a course I managed not to get any photos of prep or service, the “Hot and Sour Soup.”

The concept in this dish was to feature the vinegar, since it was the Vinegar course. (Vinegar being one of the Seven Essentials, see original post for explanation on that.)

I didn’t want a traditional, slimy “hot and sour” soup. I wanted to highlight vinegar as a desirable flavor of its own. And duck, of course. My thought was to make it more like a consomme, with duck broth (we make a ton of duck stock for this meal), just a touch of “hot”.

We bought a few vinegars to try in the soup, including a palm sugar vinegar, Chinese “chinkiang” vinegar, and we have a ton of rice wine, white, sherry, balsamic, etc… stocked here to begin with.

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Duck Day 2012: The Seven Essentials

Tradition holds that there are “seven essentials for Chinese life” and that these make for a civilized household in what is colloquially called “Open Door Seven Items”: wood, rice, oil, salt, soy/fermented sauces, vinegar, tea. (Some attribute this list to Confucius, but it is probably older.) This year’s menu incorporates many of these elements into each course, but each course has a featured essential.

It’s been several years since we did an Asian fusion meal for Duck Day, and my recent visits to that various Momofuku outlets (NYC Noodlebar and Ma Peche, Toronto Shoto) plus seeing David Chang speak last year had gotten my wheels turning. I’ve been plotting to do a “Seven Essentials” dim sum at some point, but I’ve been so busy haven’t gotten around to inviting people over or doing the test recipes I want to. Instead, we adopted the Seven Essentials theme to do this as a Seven Course meal, as follows: (menu and then picspam of the meal…)

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

The power went out around 2:45 in the afternoon here, amid howling winds that rattled the house. Lost phone and Internet at the same time. NSTAR had an easy to use mobile website I could use from my cell phone to report the problem. It said heavy winds had downed many lines in our area and caused many outages. Yep.

Managed to get in one game of cribbage while all electronic forms of entertainment were unavailable, and corwin cooked eggs and sausage on our gas stove with his battery-powered LED headlamp on.

Power came back at just before 6pm. Internet came back around 7:30pm. Regular phone still hasn’t come back but we have to check the box outside for that. The wind died down around 9pm and really hasn’t been much, and the only really heavy rain was between 6-8pm. Now it’s not even raining (midnight-thirty or so).

So basically everything’s back to normal here on this side of Boston. I have yet to check out news reports of whether the storm surge wreaked much flooding-type havoc here. My entire Twitter feed is about New York City, where it sounds like a severe disaster is underway, hospitals without power, fire trucks unable to get through because of flooding, 13+ feet water recorded at Battery, ConEd substations exploding spectacularly, cranes dangling, and the entire front walls of buildings (two, that I’ve heard of) blowing off.

Nothing like that here. I’m working on revising SLOW SURRENDER (my BDSM romance novel for Grand Central Publishing) and corwin is making a steak. All is well.

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Help me find cover art for a gorgeous book about a dominant woman and her male submissive!

So, Circlet Press will be publishing a book very soon called The Viscountess Investigates by Cameron Quintain. It’s an erotic mystery in a BDSM fantasy world which intersects our own, in which a dominant woman (the Viscountess) and her submissive (the aptly named Severin) are a detective team who must move through the various BDSM “dominions” (alternate universes reached through a kind of S/M-based magic) to search for a killer.

It’s a smart book, very sexy, with touches of victoriana, leather culture, and many many sf/fantasy references. Most importantly, its main characters are not young fluffy porn models.

The search for a cover photograph or image has so far proved fruitless. Most of the stuff out there with any kind of BDSM theme is of 18-year-old girls with teased hair and blue eyeshadow in collars and PVC. Um, no.

What I would love is something like:
- a tasteful image of a woman’s boot-clad leg, being kissed by a worshipful male submissive
- a shot of her leather gloved hands, one holding a whip/flogger and one a Sherlock-Holmes-style magnifying glass
- A woman in Victorian dress with a man (clothed or no) kneeling at her feet

Now, you’d think a photo of a man kissing a shoe or boot wouldn’t be too hard to find in stock photo sites, but it’s just a barren wasteland.

Our budget is not huge, but I can offer up to $50 for use of an image if someone has one to sell me the rights to. It needs to be 300 dpi and a minimum of 6×6″ in size (6×9″ is ideal, but we can deal with other aspect ratios). Suggestions, pointers, artist friends, please send them my way. Thank you!

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

So yesterday the rain started exactly at 2pm, when the first of the very outer bands of Hurricane Irene reached us. Around 3pm was the worst, when it was so dark the streetlights came on and we had a downpour so thick we couldn’t see the house across the street. You can see the radar picture below that I took 22 minutes before the first rain — we’re at the white crossed-circle on the map. At that point the eye of the hurricane was still something like 400 miles away (Baltimore).

By 4pm, when we were trying to get out barbecue grille into the basement, it was back to just light rain.

The rest of the day and evening alternated light rain and very still, windless, rainless conditions.

This morning I woke up to find we hadn’t lost power in the night, Internet is still on, and it’s not even raining at all now — and Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm. The eye took a northward track after hitting New York City and they are currently being hammered by heavy rains and wind in upstate New York. The eye is missing us by about 180 miles, and the way the rain bands have formed… we’re being especially spared. Check out the radar photo below to see what I mean! We’re where that red pin is in the map.

I haven’t checked all the news reports yet on how much flooding may have happened at the coast or in the harbor, but right now, it’s actually ALMOST sunny, not raining at all, and although it’s windy, even the gusts don’t seem as strong as we get in a typical winter nor’easter. High tide this morning at 11am was supposedly 9.7 feet, and they’re expecting the 11pm one to be around 11 feet in Boston Harbor. (Several feet above normal.)

My thoughts and prayers to those who are still in the storm track. That’s still a lot of water, folks. (A tweet from friends near the eye say they’ve gotten 5 inches already today and it’s still coming down.)

Photos under the cut!

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

More from Iceland! (OK, I thought I’d have a chance to post this from the airport, but I didn’t, and now i’ve been home for a week and I’m just getting to it…!)

So, the folks working the reception desk at my hotel are filipinos. One from Cebu and one from Leyte. The guy from Cebu said he used to live on Long Island. The woman from Leyte told me there are about 300 filipinos in Iceland (out of 300,000 total population). I’ve met more filipinos now in Iceland and in London than I have in Boston. Funny, no?

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

So I started a crowdfunding drive over at Daron’s Guitar Chronicles a few weeks back, but I’m going to change the focus a bit starting today and make the participation a little more urgent, perhaps?

For every $100 raised before May 7th (this Friday), Daron will come out to someone new. We’re currently only $45 from someone right now! Put in a donation of any amount and you get to vote on who he tells next! Not only that, he’ll do it before May is out.

Previous poll software on the site didn’t work that well, so just put your choice of who in the message section of your donation at Paypal. Possible choices include: Christian, Digger, Martin (Remo’s drummer), Colin (roadie) & housemates, the media, et al. (Long lost family, perhaps?)

Find all the donation options spelled out on the Tip Jar page: http://daron.ceciliatan.com/tip-jar

You have until Friday! If you have been meaning to donate to Daron’s Guitar Chronicles recently, now’s the time!

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I’m still fighting with Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s a pain to say the least. It’s hard to say where feeling crappy mentally leaves off and feeling crappy physically takes over. It’s like I’ve never gotten over the cold I got at the end of October. This week it’s a cough and congestion. Bleah.

I’m off to Atlanta next week to run the Fetish Fair Fleamarket there. I need help! If you’re in the area, I could use volunteers helping out, and I could use help spreading the word about the event. The thing we need most is ticket sales! Details: http://www.fetishfairfleamarket.com/?page_id=132

Meanwhile, I got a notice from British Airways they are having a VERY VERY BIG SALE. I go to their website to see about buying tickets for my trip to the UK in July for Dia-Con Alley. They’ve got Boston – London flights on sale around ~$300 each way for every month EXCEPT July. Even flying back August 1st, it quotes me a price of more than $500 each way, plus $197 in taxes and fees. Jeez. That’ll be ~$1200. Some sale?? Ugh.

Everything in life will be better once I get through Atlanta and get back to writing books. Speaking of which, looks like I’ll be in NYC on February 4th to do a reading at the Happy Endings Lounge! That’s the night club where the In the Flesh reading series was hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussell for so many years. I’m waiting to hear full details.

We did have a major breakthrough with two of the three kittens two nights ago. Oolong has been very outgoing all along, and finally decided he actually enjoys being petted, and now often wants to chew a string, attack my slipper, and eat a paper ball all at the same time while being petted with BOTH HANDS. He’s the one who always purred a lot. Wednesday night, though Pu-ehr purred for the first time! Kate was giving him chicken and I petted his back and he started to purr. Last night he let me scritch his neck and back and purred just from that without needing any bribe. He’s still skittish at first but then he warms up.

Which leaves poor little Earl Grey. He’s still so afraid. But you can see he’s bored and jealous when his brothers are getting all the attention and treats. Sometimes that just winds him up more because he feels left out, and then he gets more upset and freaks, hisses, and hides. Hopefully he’ll come around soon, though.

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Today is Friday. We’ve only had the kittens since Monday and they have been eating like fiends and are, I think, noticeably larger than they were a few days ago!

Link to the Picasa album directly is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ctan.writer/MoarKittenPicspam?feat=directlink

Or I’ve embedded it in the original post below the cut:

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.