Indecisive

Slept late on my birthday, then did a little housework (laundry, vacuuming). The family really wanted to take me out for dinner, so we went to a family-owned Italian restaurant (not the one in Silver Spring that I really like; they don't do dinner on Sundays) and I had cheese tortellini in a four cheese sauce and cannoli for dessert. Yum.

Spent yesterday laying around and playing WoW. Doing the insomnia thing tonight (hence the 4a posting), but I actually have to be up and about today (therapy in the afternoon, and I need to go past the house first to pick up the check and maybe do some picking up). I know I can actually manage a normal sleep schedule; I just don't have any specific reason to right now, so I can't be bothered. Bad idea, I know.

In unrelated news, I'm having structural issues with my stargate_summer fic. I've never really written a novel-length story before; An Apple a Day is practically individual fic, and each "chapter" has a specific prompt; and Osprey, the unfinished original novel I started, God, ten years ago, came to me completely structured, and I just had to fill the framework in. I'm much more blind on this one, and I'm having issues figuring out where to divide the chapters. I'm using a limited third person to narrate, but the focus character (whose thoughts they are) is going to change from one section to the next. Should a single chapter have only one narrator? Should there be some sort of mini-cliffhanger to take the reader into the next chapter? I have a feeling I should ignore this for now and come back to it during beta, or at least not until Part 1 is done, but I'm getting hung up on it, since right now I'm just writing individual scenes, and I''m pretty sure I'll want some sort of separation in the final version. Ugh, I don't know.

More for my own notes than anything.

This is an unsuccessful version of the fried rice recipe:

2 tbsp peanut oil
2 cups cold cooked rice
8 oz can chunked pineapple, drained
8 oz can water chestnuts, drained
8 oz can bamboo shoots, drained
1/2 cup edamame, shelled
2 tbsp sesame oil

The process is right (toss rice in peanut oil, add veggies, and sesame oil), but I didn't cook it long enough (only 15 minutes, and it should have been more) and the proportions are off. Need to halve the sesame oil (can't taste anything else), and make sure to use sliced water chestnuts rather than whole ones (that was a buying error, and I didn't feel like chopping them up). The bamboo shoots, etc. didn't really cook through, which I think would be fixed by extending the cooking time. And I don't like this brand of water chestnuts; they have a metallic taste to them. (Could also have doubled the amount of edamame, but they didn't cook through, either.)

Ah, well, that's why it's an experiment. I'm hoping that later microwaving of the leftover portions will help it cook through more. We'll see.