A Little-Less-Labor Day

I’m going to rant a little. But there’s booze at the end of it. I promise.

As we head toward Labor Day, I dream of a leisurely transition in which we stretch, take a deep breath of sunblock and bug spray, slowly pull ourselves from lawn chair, beach chair or hammock, and ease back into our work lives, having spent a quiet month because our career workload slows down in August.

But that’s hardly true for anybody anymore.

I read business-page stories now and then about how American productivity has stalled. In them, I rarely find consideration of the number of workers who are already doing the job of three and they just might be tapped out.

We have people who dread vacations because when they return to the office, they’ll have to put in more miserable hours catching up on the work that didn’t get done while they were gone because there isn’t enough staff to do it.


Some companies talk about their commitment to creating a balance between career and personal lives, but for most, it’s largely lip service. I was thinking about that even before I read the New York Times article about Amazon. At least Amazon appears to be upfront: Forget your personal life; if you come to work here, you belong to us 24/7.

And then there’s Walmart’s approach to labor. They recently blamed lowered earnings projections on the increase they made in employee salaries, even though the company hasn’t strayed very far from their old business model, the one where their employees were more like lightly reimbursed volunteers.

If you work in the Consumer sector, don’t even think about getting Labor Day off (or most holidays, come to that). And while you’re on the job, customers will blame you because the place you work is short-staffed and those who are there have been too often astoundingly under-trained. If a business pays low wages, it’s more likely to suffer high turnover. Training new staff well isn’t cheap, so if the company doesn’t want to pay for it, it must rely on overworked employees to carry the new guy till he gets trained by osmosis. There has to have been a cost-benefit analysis done somewhere that says the cost in the number of disaffected customers isn’t great enough to justify adequate training. But I wonder if the people who did the analysis are the same ones who declared subprime mortgages would never default.

Okay, I'm almost done.

The transition into Labor Day ought to be much less stressful for all of us; we ought to have more time to enjoy it.

It seems the least I can do—and it really is the least I can do—is share a recipe for a homemade treat that is easy, easy, and—did I mention—easy. Maybe you'll get to spend a few more precious minutes in the hammock reading a mystery before the guests arrive.

---

Easy Peasy, Fresh and Squeezy Sangria

Two things to keep in mind: One, if you like your red wine really sweet, this recipe is not for you; two, re-read One.

What you’re going to need.
1 pitcher; a bit of clingy plastic wrap to cover the top
1 ounce of brandy. Use the cognac you bought last Christmas when you planned to look sophisticated
4 tablespoons sugar
1 bottle of red wine (750 ml). Please don’t use any wine you wouldn’t drink straight
1 lemon, cut into 4 wedges; leave rind on
1 large orange, cut into 6 wedges; leave rind on
2 cups club soda (added right before serving)

What you’re going to do
Add the brandy to the pitcher
Add the sugar and stir till the sugar is uniformly distributed
Add the bottle of red wine, pouring slowly down the side so you don’t splatter it all over yourself
Stir till wine and sugar mixture are combined
Add lemon and orange wedges. If the fruit is “seedy”, dig out as many seeds as you easily can with your thumbnail
Stir, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate till well chilled, about 4 hours
When time to serve, uncover the pitcher. Squeeze the fruit wedges’ juices into the pitcher. If the fruit was seedy or you have an abiding fear of pulp, squeeze through a strainer. Discard wedges.
Add the club soda, stir and serve (straight or over ice)

This sangria also goes very well with hearty fall and winter dishes, so you can enjoy it as well at Thanksgiving and Christmas when we get Labor Day on steroids.


Copyright 2015 Sheila York

Murder Mystery by Committee

At ten in the morning last Sunday a panel called "What If" took place at Deadly Ink, a small conference in New Brunswick for writers and readers of crime fiction. The "What If" panel was one of those where the panelists and the audience make up a whole murder mystery out of nothing, starting by inventing a detective and ending with the solution to the mystery.

I've been to a few of these things over the years, with a lot of bright, famous, witty people on the panels, and I don't recall any of those other panels working quite as well as this one did. Maybe it was the moderator, E. F. Watkins. Maybe it was the panelists, Annette Dashofy, Jane Kelly, the inimitable Brad Parks, and our own Sheila York. Maybe it was the audience members who offered suggestions and plot points, among them Annamaria Alfieri. But when they were finished, all these folks had outlined a good story. It was not a cozy, everyone agreed, although no animals were harmed that we know of.

We began with the detective. Professional or amateur? Amateur, everyone said. A librarian, said Paula Lanier. (I think Paula took the picture above, though I'm not sure. A lot of great panel pictures have been flying around.) A corporate librarian in a drug company, I suggested, figuring that a drug company was an excellent place for evil and chicanery of every sort. (Nobody remembered Jersey Monkey, so that was all right.) And everyone assumed that the librarian detective must be a woman. So they called her Sheila.

Good. The crime? Murder. The victim? The company's C.E.O. The reason for Sheila the librarian to investigate? They were having an affair, and she is a suspect. The means of death? An embolism caused by an injection of air from a hypodermic needle. Roberta Rogow insisted that hypodermic needles were passé. So, okay, the needle, found at the crime scene, came from a museum-type display case in the corporate library. Someone was trying to frame Sheila. Now for the suspects: the victim's wife, their son, the son's wife, and a failed litigant in a suit against the drug company.

And so it went. In the process of putting the story together the panelists and audience members made choices, accepting or rejecting various plot elements according to their own personal tastes and value systems as well as what they perceived to be the generally accepted norms of readers. Annamaria refused to entertain any plot idea that involved harm, or remote threat of harm, to a child. Brad Parks had to point out that as an adulterer the C.E.O. would fall so low in the readers' estimation that no one would care that he was dead. But his wife is sick, someone said. Ah, he said. John Edwards. It was held to be important for the reader to care about the victim. And so a long discussion ensued to figure out how to make the affair okay from the standpoint of the wife.

If you want to know whodunnit, I'll tell you in the comments later. I think the point I'm trying to make is that the character of the writer—the writer's moral nature—infuses the work. What was so delightful and refreshing about this panel, at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning when all of us had been partying until, say, midnight the night before, was the sweetness of character they showed as they crafted the story. It made me want to read their books. (Of course I've already read Sheila's books. And Annamaria's. Great stuff.)

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Today we go to Deadly Ink

Not all of us, just Annamaria Alfieri, Sheila York, and me. We plan to wear our official tee shirts and act like big shots as members of the famous Crime Writers' Chronicle. Everybody else there will be a big shot, too, each in his or her own way; the other writers because they write, the fans because without them we would have no readers (a sad state of affairs), and Debby Buchanan (a bit of both writer and fan), because she put the whole shebang together.

The Deadly Ink conference takes place at the Hyatt Regency New Brunswick, and will be running all weekend. There's still time to pick up a ticket and show up. If you plan to go, here's when we will be on panels, and what panels we will be on:

Annamaria will be on Location, Location, Location at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, and will moderate the Q & A With some Real "Characters" at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon.

Sheila will be on the Pros vs Amateurs panel at 9:00 Saturday morning, will moderate Ripped from the Headlines at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, and will be on the What If? panel at 10:00 Sunday morning and the Q & A With some Real "Characters" at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon.

I will be on the Jersey Girls/Boys panel on Friday evening, probably still stuffing myself with Deadly Desserts, and on the Short and Sweet (or Sour) panel at nine on Saturday morning, talking about short stories.

And of course we will be wandering around the conference at other times, perfectly willing to talk to friends, acquaintances, and strangers. You will know us by our CWC tee shirts. All the famous people will be wearing them.

To find out more, visit the Deadly Ink web site.

Kate Gallison

Lessons from the (Badminton) Net

Reading: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
(Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera)
Watching on TV: Halt and Catch Fire (AMC)
Re-watching: Clean & Sober (1988; Michael Keaton, Kathy Baker)

Last month, David and I rediscovered badminton (which I always want to spell “badmitten” and which is probably not a good thing to admit since in my other career, I’m an editor).

David wanted to get off the treadmill up in his office and go outside for exercise after our brutal winter and nippy spring. I wanted something to raise my heart rate that wasn’t called Liam Neeson.

As children, David and I both loved to play badminton —minton. It was one of the few sports I was naturally pretty good at. In fact, when I look back, I had some talent for high-net sports. But volleyball could only be played at school in gym class, and then you had to deal with the girls who didn't want to go after balls if it might make them sweat in front of the boys. The closest I ever came to brawling in school.

David found a portable set in a catalog, and early in the morning, before it gets too hot, we will set it up in the backyard and play for about an hour (40 minutes of play + 20 minutes of gasping and sit-down-with-water breaks).

At this stage, David refers to our game as Worseminton.

Badminton’s history is a bit vague, including why it was named after Badminton House, the home of a guy called the Duke of Beaufort. The game was probably blended from games played in India and the Far East, and it might have been brought back to the UK by Brits who, as was their wont back then, were continually marching armies off to foreign shores looking for some sunshine.

But back to the present day. Let's get out our rackets.

The first lesson I learned was that playing at age 12 is a lot different than playing with bifocals. The birdie enters my peripheral vision and then the Bermuda Triangle.

The second lesson is The Ugly Truth: For exercise to work, it has to test you. It doesn’t have to render you drained and nauseous — that’s what your commute is for — but it has to make you work. In one month, I’ve lost 3 pounds by doing nothing different except playing badminton 2 to 3 times a week. In a year of a regular routine of walking, I got sore knees.

Probably because I was light-headed from lack of oxygen, one morning I began to see parallels between badminton — minton — and writing.

Lesson: As in writing, forces beyond your control can make you doubt yourself.

Think your game’s improving? Here, have a little wind. Have some humidity. Have a day when your legs are totally unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration. Have a day when after you’ve told someone at a cocktail party what you write, they feel compelled to tell you how much they hate amateur sleuth novels because they are so contrived.


Lesson: When a problem comes right at your head, you don't rationally consider your options.

You do what you can to protect yourself and remain rooted to the spot. Ask any writer who’s been told by their publisher that the next book in their series isn’t being picked up.

Anybody who tells you they didn’t react that way for a while… Well, think twice before you loan them money.

Lesson: There are times you shouldn’t keep score.

When a writer friend gets a rave review in a publication that has trashed you, it’s best to celebrate her success. The alternative is not going to do anything positive for your career or your character.

David and I have decided instead to see how long we can keep the rally going. We're at 35 years and counting.

And this winter, I’m playing in my badmittens.

© 2015 Sheila York

Malice: A Forethought, Part II

Sheila York
On the night table: The Question of the Missing Head, EJ Copperman & Jeff Cohen
(who are the same person)

Too bad there isn't a legal term Malice Afterthought. Or Malice After-anything, actually, as far as I can determine. 

So I have to settle for Part II as the title for my follow-up to last week's blog & my visit to the Malice Domestic mystery writer/fan convention over the weekend.

To recap, Malice (as everybody calls it) celebrates traditional mysteries, which are, by Malice's definition, those "...which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence." There is a traditional-mystery subcategory, called cozy, which would certainly add “no profanity".

Thursday, following the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards  Wednesday night, I took a midday train down to Washington DC. Leisurely, quiet – well, okay, I giggle-snorted most of the trip at comments from buddy Judy Bobalik, who is one of the funniest people I know and one of the biggest "bookies". You mention it, she's read it. Judy's been one of the movers behind several past Bouchercon conventions, including being co-chair of the 2008 BCon in Baltimore. 

That's Judy, fourth from left, hugging on Charles Todd (third from left) outside The Mysterious Bookshop in NYC at the launch party of the Mystery Writers of America Cookbook on April 27. 

Charles gave No Broken Hearts a rave review. I should be the one hugging on him!

When Judy and I weren’t disporting ourselves, we helped a colleague – whose name we will protect to preserve any dignity he has left after hanging out with us – download apps. I always enjoy helping people who know even less than I do about tech.

Malice is held each year in the first weekend of May in Bethesda, and you can ride the Washington DC Metro from Union Station to the Bethesda stop right under the hotel, so there's no cab fare, and this year I traveled light, having finally got around to buying a 22-inch bag, which is just the perfect size for those of us not encumbered by the need to wear more than 2 outfits all weekend. Of course, it won't hold all the books you want to buy written by all the terrific writers you want to read, but that's what Malice's shipping service is for! 

Thursday night, Judy and I went out to dinner, and our restraint, such as it is, lasted just as long as it took for us to spot a burger with whipped goat cheese on the menu. In truth, healthy eating is not something I can often be caught doing away from home. Then I collapsed into bed, hoping I would not be punished for eating more red meat than I generally get in a month. [I was not.] 

Alice writes a series about an ex-nun turned PI.
The latest is Second to Nun

Friday, I got up early and eased into the day in the hotel's lobby catching up with people I hadn't seen in a year, and meeting some new folks, including Alice Loweecey, who would be one of my Saturday panel-mates. Here we are caffeinating together.

Even ignoring the caffeine contribution, the rest of Friday flew by, with panels by Agatha Award nominees, and so I was left at the end of the day to deal with my requisite obsessing about my own panel. To distract me, my writing buddy, John Billheimer (John lives on the West Coast, but we exchange chapters for gentle critique), took me out to dinner and then to Eno’s in Georgetown, my favorite wine bar. Okay, I've never been to any other wine bar in Washington DC, but the first time I went there, a few Malices ago, I was having trouble reading the wine list in the dim lighting, and the server gently pointed out that the cell phone beside me had a flashlight. I thanked him. He bowed and said, "Sommelier and tech support." I was won over. 

Saturday started with the Sisters in Crime breakfast, overseen by President Catriona McPherson. How can a woman be that funny at 7:30 in the morning? (Pick up her The Day She Died, nominated for an Edgar this year.) 

Then, at 10:00a, my panel: Cozy Noir?: Private Eyes. Why had I been worried? How can a girl go wrong on a panel with Sara Paretsky, Elaine Viets, Alice Loweecey, Lane Stone, and moderated by Marcia Talley? The room was packed (thank you, Sara and Elaine!), and it was as if we were all old friends, easy give-and-take on the subject and plenty of laughs for the audience. 

The full-panel picture taken by the Malice photog won't be available for a while. Trying to get an amateur group shot before or after was impossible because of the crush of attendees wanting to chat. (My favorite kind of crush.) But here is one taken during the panel of me and Lane Stone (author of the Tiara Investigations series; we are sisters in hair color).

It was a glorious ride. Thanks, ladies, and especially to Marcia, who stepped in at practically the last minute as replacement moderator. And well done, Malice!

And while I was away for only 3 days:

Copyright 2015 Sheila York

Malice: A Forethought

By the time you read this, I’ll be on a train to Washington DC, sleep-deprived, but ready to commit (to) Malice. 

The Malice Domestic writer/fan convention celebrates the traditional mystery, giving the “Cozy” its due in a world that sometimes seems to think that the darker and more inaccessible a mystery is, the better it must be.

This year, for the first time, I’m headed down on Thursday at a reasonable hour. 

For years, Malice competed with the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards (the Oscars of the mystery world), which were held on Thursday night. So, if you went to the Edgars, you missed part of Malice. Unless you stayed up and took the 4am train.

I did that once, when Death in Her Face came out. I was lucky enough to get a spot in the Malice Go Round, which gives authors who’ve had books published since the previous Malice a chance to meet a few hundred readers in a sort of speed-dating for authors.

There was not enough Refresh in the world to get the red out of my eyes. I looked like a character in a paranormal. 

This year however, the Edgars were held on Wednesday night. I think there might have been some confusion about dates on the part of the hotel. It would explain two bottles of free wine on each table.

The Edgar Awards are the culminating event of Edgar Week, which kicked off Monday evening with the launch of the Mystery Writers of America Cookbook at Mysterious Bookshop. 

“Wickedly good” recipes from dozens of celebrated writers. Here are two. From left, contributors Alafair Burke and Chris Pavone, with editor Kate White, and administrative director of MWA, Margery Flax. 

And here is non-contributor me, catching some cool air and outdoor conversation with the legendary Otto Penzler, Charles Todd (contributor), Judy Bobolik, Ruth Jordan and Crimespree Cats. 

Tuesday, it was the MWA Symposium, panels of really famous writers and the Edgar nominees (some of those are the same people) with cogent insights on the craft, business and heart of writing. That’s followed each year by a cocktail party for MWA members, with agents and editors as guests. That's followed by going out and staying out late in NYC with friends you haven't seen in months!

Then the Edgars. Repeat last sentence above.

Hence, my sleep deprivation.

But I'm looking forward to Malice, especially my panel.  Although there was a frisson of anxiety about that late last week.

The moderator had to bow out suddenly, and moderating is not a job just anyone can step into. It’s not simply coming up with a few questions that fit the topic and asking each panelist the same thing, and hope interesting discussion magically occurs. Not if you do it right.

But – sigh of relief – the excellent Marcia Talley, the author of the Hannah Ives series, agreed to step in. Here’s Marcia with her Agatha for Best Short Story a few Malices ago.

Actually BIG sigh of relief. I know I'm in excellent hands. And this has not always been the case.

I’ve attended dozens of different conventions all across the country and have had largely very enjoyable panel experiences. But I've had a few bad ones, and they haunt me and can cause nervous tics to develop just upon entering a hotel ballroom. Let me give you two examples.  

Second-worst panel I was ever on, the moderator let one panelist hijack the whole show, allowing him to go on and on for about 10 minutes to each question, while the rest of us politely confined ourselves to the 3 minutes that were the alleged maximum. I was halfway into answering only my second question when the timekeeper at the back of the room held up the Time for Q&A sign.

The worst was the one in which the moderator gave us no idea what she was going to do with the topic because she liked to “wing it” and thought that was a great way to encourage spontaneity. I think it's a great way to encourage stuttering and half-considered answers that can make a person look addled. Her focus and the panel topic bore no resemblance to each other. She talked about what interested her, not what the organizers thought might appeal to the readers. In addition, she apparently paid no attention to the bio I sent her, as her introduction got my series wrong; she had confused me with another convention attendee named Sheila.

So you can see how relieved I am that at 10:00 Saturday morning, I will be with Marcia and Alice Loweecey, Sara Paretsky, Lane Stone, and Elaine Viets chatting about “Cozy Noir?: Private Eyes”.

Cozy Noir? I can’t wait to see what we do with that one. 

"Traditional mysteries" – by Malice's definition – are "...mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence."  For cozies, one would certainly add “no profanity". 

My best friend Kathy once described extreme noir as "never love; never hope."

So, we have quite a spectrum here, and I started thinking about where my series would fall on that spectrum from Cozy to Noir?

I don’t write explicit sex, though you can certainly guess what might have just happened or is about to between Lauren and Peter. It never felt right to make the sex explicit. Lauren’s a lady, a lady of the 1940s, circumspect about her personal life. She’s the first person narrator. I can’t imagine her suddenly being graphic with the reader about sex. 

I don’t do gruesome violence. A couple of people have been shot on the page, and plenty of bodies have been found after the killer was through with them. But my on-page violence is more like the time Peter took the security chief of a major studio and put him headfirst into a file cabinet because the guy had put Lauren in danger, and Peter thought it was a good idea to point out to the guy that he shouldn’t ever do that again.

My series does have some profanity. Occasionally characters who are the kind of people who would swear, do. Though nobody does it very often.

However, my series’ view of the world is considerably darker than a cozy. While the killers are always caught, I'm keenly aware while I’m writing of the difference between justice and the world being put right again. People die, and the lives of those left behind will be changed forever. Those who loved the victim and those who cared about or were betrayed by the killer. And there are some recurring unsavory characters (including one based on the most dangerous gangster in LA in the mid 1940s) who will never get their just desserts.

But I hope Lauren’s wry humor keeps the tone from ever settling in too dark a place.

Speaking of a darker place…  I was going to include a picture here of me and fellow panelists at last year’s Malice.  But I was sitting right under a super-harsh florescent spotlight. Turned to the sky, it could have signaled Batman. Photoshop doesn't seem to have an option for "Make top of subject's head look normal."

Note to self: This year, pick a seat more on the noir end of the spectrum.  

Sheila York

What You Can Predict About the Oscars

Sheila York

Watching: Season 3: White Collar

Reading: The Drop, Michael Connelly   

You knew what was coming. You knew that the second the Oscars were over, the requisite movie critics’ proclamations would begin about how out of touch Hollywood is with moviegoers.

The biggest moneymaker didn’t win Best Picture.  The movie that did had, at that point, been seen by roughly one-seventh the number of people who watched the Oscars (5 million vs. 36 million). 

Many of the most popular movies of 2014 were ignored entirely in nominations.

Great performances; Total number of people who've seen their movies
probably less than saw them win

How can that be? the critics seem to be saying. How can an industry that regards receipts above all things not want to just hand out statues to whoever’s movies made the most money?

And you knew they’d complain about the show. They always do. What’s that line about insanity being when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result?

I wasn’t bowled over by the show, either, but I don’t expect to be. Producing that show is an enormous task, especially given the limitations and demands (you have to let Travolta present so he can publicly apologize to Idina Menzel). So I lay on the sofa, cheer for my favorites and drink too much wine. But I guess if you’re a movie critic, you’d lose your job doing that. (The low-expectations/laying-on-sofa part; I think getting sloshed would be fine as long as you made deadline.)

I watch. And when something wonderful happens – like John Legend and Common’s performance of Glory – I am reminded what artists can do and shout hallelujah.

I might have let one series of reviews upset me too much: Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes’ in the New York Times continued to report that the orchestra played off two documentary-film winners while they were talking about suicide. Messrs Cieply and Barnes, the orchestra did not play those women off while they were talking about a suicide. The orchestra began to play them off after they had reached the limit of allotted time. Then in wrapping up, one of the women said, “…he committed suicide…”.  The orchestra – as soon as a human being would have had time to process that (maybe two seconds) – stopped playing. I’m giving Messrs Cieply and Barnes the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that they actually watched that part, and have not relied for their opinion on Twitter comments.

All right, let’s move on. David tells me I really need to let go of that one.

I’d like to explain the Oscars’ alleged audience “disconnect” with a bit of (very high-points-only) history.

The Oscars were largely irrelevant to audiences before TV almost killed the movies. The Academy was formed in the late 1920s to negotiate labor disputes and improve the image of Hollywood, which it sorely needed, given the uproar regularly created by the content of some silent films. Ask Kate about that!

But rather quickly, it became American films’ historian, librarian, and artistic arbiter with its awards of merit. Established stars won; A-list pictures did too. It was a party given by Hollywood for Hollywood. Of course, studios and stars liked winning, but by the time a movie won, it was no longer in the theaters, and the studios couldn’t cash in on it.  

Then in the early 1950s, TV began its rampage. Movie profits plummeted. Hollywood began to use the awards as a way to help return focus to the movies – and used TV to do it, by broadcasting the show (beginning in 1953). 

And they made flashy films, the sort of thing you couldn't see on the small screen. Spectacle got rewarded in that decade: American in Paris, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Ben-Hur and The Bridge on the River Kwai (which actually deserved it). 

The Production Code – the censorship that ruled Hollywood beginning in 1934 – had made any forthright examination of complex human emotions and conditions almost impossible. But after WWII, foreign films, mostly European at that time, began getting attention. 

They were experimental, edgy, and dealt frankly with real life – Whoa there, Mr. De Sica, you have a scene in a brothel? No way. Cut that out of The Bicycle Thief, or we won’t show your movie over here in the good old US of A. Still audiences turned out to see it in very limited release – uncut.

The Code continued to weaken as more and more of the US audience wanted more complexity, and Hollywood wanted to find something to get those baby boomer butts into the theaters. In the 1960s, prosperity put considerable disposable income in the hands of teenagers for the first time. And while there were certainly big-budget, broad-appeal films like The Sound of Music, you could also find gritty, brutally honest movies without happy endings – hello, Midnight Cowboy. They got screen time and took home awards.

Then Hollywood discovered the Blockbuster in the late 70s (Jaws – nominated; Star Wars – not) and not long after, Oscar began getting thumped soundly for not recognizing all that money being made.

That thumping, however, coincided with the growth of “small films”.  Producers and distributors appeared for less expensive movies because the audience and available venues were expanding in number.  Then the Oscars, looking to get more big films nominated, expanded the Best Picture nominee list to as many as 10 films. Which resulted in more small films being nominated. And winning. And more of those films' artists being invited to join the Academy, and more small films being nominated, and ... I’m getting a little dizzy from the going round in circles.

Which brings me to . . .

I haven’t seen all of Birdman, which won Best Picture. I did hear all of it, though. The currently very popular loose-camera technique – where the camera joggles and swings as it records action – makes me nauseous. Not figuratively, because I really like the right-in-the-action feel it can give. I mean literally nauseous. After 20 minutes, I'm carsick. In some movies, (and it happened in Birdman) I have to close my eyes, take off my socks and shoes, and put my bare feet on the cold (sticky) floor to keep from sharing my grief with the back of the head of the person in front of me.

I don’t have the same reaction on a small screen, so I can watch the whole movie soon on Blu-ray.

My favorite film of the year was Guardians of the Galaxy. Too bad Groot couldn’t present the best-support Oscar. Now I think on it, if nominees had been required to come from big-money movies, Bradley Cooper would have been nominated twice – for American Sniper and as the “I’m not a raccoon” in Guardians. (Guardians could also have won had there been a category for best use of music from other decades.)

After that, these are the rest of my favorites of the movies I saw in 2014 – in no order whatsoever. I recommend them.

 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Whiplash

Selma

Gone Girl

Non-Stop

Get on Up

The Imitation Game

Edge of Tomorrow (or Live. Die. Repeat.)

The Theory of Everything
Big Hero 6
Divergent
Begin Again
Wild

The 100-Foot Journey

Chef

They were among David’s favorites, too, but he’d like to add these:

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

John Wick
Maleficent
Captain America: Winter Soldier 

Copyright 2015 Sheila York

Slicing Away at the Holidays

Midnight: Thanksgiving has begun

No matter how many times I remark upon it in October, Thanksgiving always slips up on me. On October 15, I'm sure I can get it all done, and then suddenly Thanksgiving is a week away, the menu is random notes on post-its, no shopping has been done, no cleaning, and I'm thinking, Wait a minute, how did this happen? Every single year.

I continue to believe that despite having a writing career and another career that, combined, make weeks go by in which tiles have come up in the bathroom floor and I haven't noticed, I should be able to display a gift of organization and time-conjuring for which I have hitherto shown absolutely no talent whatsoever. 

Which brings me to last week. 

My husband and I doubled down, and decided on a "bridge too far" menu. We had an excuse after all. Our friend Mariann is a vegetarian, and comes to stay the weekend with us every year. She's inspired us to eat much better, so we want to give her terrific dishes at Thanksgiving, not just the same old "sides" while we eat turkey. This year, we'd outdo ourselves with a half dozen new recipes. Yes, right, new. As in never tried before, and so are guaranteed to 1) fail; or 2) provoke locked-jaw remarks because somebody didn't read the part where it said the dish had to be marinated for 6 hours; or 3) both. 

However, David decided the way to avoid this was to test the new recipes last week. On Friday, it was the potatoes au gratin. Layers of thinly sliced potatoes and onions, drenched in a sauce of cream, rosemary, thyme, sage, and grated Gruyere. Topped with grated Parmesan and baked till bubbly and crispy brown on top. 

I was upstairs in my office that evening, working the other career -- financial editing -- slicing away on some unbaked prose: "Clearly, for the one-year period two years before the observation years, the HPA experiences vary for all three periods."  (In my line of work, when they start with "clearly", get the red pencil out.)

Then from the foot of the stairs, I hear, "Honey, where are the Band-aids?"

And so we ended up in the urgent care clinic where we were seen by a rather dishy-looking doctor in a garnet turban and a nurse who called us in by asking the waiting room chipperly, "So, who's bleeding?" 

The Suspect

 

What do you do when an important digit is out of commission for days? 

You ratchet back (we do not use the phrase "cut back" around here these days). 

We decided on far fewer dishes, and recipes we'd done before. Recipes that either take little time to prepare or can be made up to the point of baking/roasting or adding the dressing the day before.

Stuffing with wild mushrooms (finished product below; it will be reheated today); cauliflower roasted and dusted with cumin and paprika; a spinach salad with pomegranate seeds and blue cheese. 

I made cranberry sauce (shown here at 9am Wednesday morning, simmering for 10 mins with sugar, before cooling and being folded around orange slices and zest). It's so easy. Raises a person's confidence when there's still all that cleaning and table-setting to do. If you make cranberry sauce from scratch, just make sure the oranges are sweet. Save the bitterness for your relatives. 

Uh, yeah, we are doing the potatoes au gratin, too. Hey, it was creamy sauce with cheese. You understood that part, right?

And the assailant was released from custody yesterday as part of a work-release program due to extenuating circumstances (the finger guard had been ignored). 

So, I'm headed to bed.  With visions of store-bought pecan pie dancing in my head. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sheila York & David Nighbert

Copyright 2014