Have a Little Wax with your Chocolate.

Do you like Wax?  Do you like it enough that you want to eat Wax?  Did you know you probably eat a lot more wax than you realize?

Paraffin is used in fuels, paints, leather finishing, as a laxative, biomedical sciences, cooking, fire breathing and juggling, cosmetics, moisturizers, pesticides, cooling of mainframes, candle making, coating for paper or cloth, candy making, cheese, sealant, gum, castings, repellents, fertilizers, bullet lubricant, to stabilize explosives, crayons, propellant for rocket motors, surfboards, skis, snowboards, and the list goes on and on and on. 

When you look at chocolate, do you want the shiny, reflective chocolate or the dull, matte chocolate?  If you pick the first you are getting a lot of wax.  If you pick the second you are getting more chocolate.

The wax makes it all pretty and shiny so it sells better.  But it means less chocolate is in the mix.  It stretches the chocolate out and the confectioner can get more candy out of the same amount of chocolate.  It makes more product and increases sales and you can see why confectioners would go that route.

So take a good hard look at the chocolate shop when next you buy it from a chocolatier.  What you really want to find is dull looking chocolate.  If you are brave enough ask them how much wax they put in their chocolate. 

The best chocolate I ever had was from Trader Joe’s.  It was dull, matte, high cocoa percentage with chili pepper in it.  It was a South American chocolate.  It was amazing.  I need to see if I can go find more of it.

What I did when I forgot my book.

Futurecast by Teresa Wentzler

I NEED my mental break at lunch.  I prefer to read a book.  It takes me away from the office and into another world.  This is why I prefer to read Science Fiction or Fantasy novels as well.  But I forgot my book yesterday and instead grabbed the book I had jus finished.    I also forgot my breakfast and lunch in the fridge.  At least I didn’t leave it on the counter.

But I still needed to do SOMETHING at lunch.  I hate being bored during that time.  Being bored on company time is bad enough.  Being bored on my own time is somehow worse.

It’s a good thing I had two stitching projects with me.  The down side is that I normally do something while stitching.  Watch t.v. or a dvd or chat with people.  Not an option in my cube.  (I hate the lunch room.)  So it was still a little tedious.

I worked on this little dragon.  Maybe I’ll finish it soon and can post a picture of it completed. 

I also need to update my Tardis Project.  I have two items finished.  In the stitching world there is something we call finished but not finished.  The stitching is done but it hasn’t been turned into anything yet.  I also made a good bit of progress on my Elegant Pumpkins.  I’m still having trouble tracking down two of the colors.  Once I get those photographed, I’ll be posting that update. 

But in the meantime, here is a sample of the little dragon.  The pattern is called Futurecast and it is by Teresa Wentzler.  A lot of people hate Wentzler patterns because they tend to be ‘advanced’.  They make massive use of blending two different colors and they use tons of partial cross stitches. 

This is a free pattern on her website.  It is designed so the stitcher can easily alter the color scheme to whatever he or she wants.  I’m not blending two colors for every symbol.  I’m just using one.  So there is a little less subtlety.  I may do so if I stitch it again.  It’s not too big and the ease of swapping colors makes it a great pattern for stitching gifts.  It is a good introduction on how to change colors on patterns and the partial stitches are kept to a minimum so it is also a good introduction to Teresa Wentzler patterns in general.

How many do you have?

Do you start to draft a blog, save it in the Draft folder, and then forget about it?  I’ve got a fair number.

It occurred to me as I was deciding I’m to tired and headachy to really keep my focus.  I thought I should save it for tomorrow.  And I will.  Because bed is screaming for me a lot louder than WordPress is.

Yep, It Had Me ‘Steamed’ All Right.

When I first started reading Katie MacAlister, I didn’t know if I would like her.  It took her a couple books to get her feet under herself and I really started to like most of her books.  But this one was awful. 

It starts with a very Twainish male lead, Jack, in a world that doesn’t seem to be our world and yet is not a steampunk world.   A scientist and Quaker (which is also not believable in the characterization) who seems to land in outragious adventures everytime he tries to go on vaction.  Think Huck Finn crossed with McGuiver or something similar.

Then an accident happens in his lab that throws him into another world.  An accident that isn’t at all believable.  Nanotech and Helium?  An accident with an experiment that would have been in a ‘clean’ room rather than a room where his sister could just wander in off the street and cause the accident.   Or if not a ‘clean’ room, then at least one with a lot more security.

Then we see the world of the female lead, Octavia.  It is supposed to be a ‘Steampunk’ world but it is more of an alternative history because the world’s political structures seemed to have diverged before the Victorian era and the Industrial Revolution. 

The back-story about her and her most recent romantic relationship is fairly interesting.

But the book falls apart as soon as Jack and Hallie from ‘our’ reality find themselves in the alternate ‘steampunk (NOT)’ reality.  For starters, he never takes it seriously.  He treats it like he has landed in a world-sized, science fiction convention. 

For a romance writer, she uses some the worst of the outdated concepts that authors moved away from a good 20 years ago or so.   

It went downhill so fast that this is one of the few books I’ve ever spent money on that I actually stopped reading.  It was so bad I couldn’t even justify giving it away. 

The sad thing is that if she had kept the two worlds completely separate, she would have had two really interesting stories to tell.  The attempt to force them into one story was a failure.

It seemed like a writing experiment that didn’t work but got published anyway because her name has a big enough following.  They realized they could make a profit off it before word of mouth got around about how bad it really was.

A Golden Obscenity

Some things should not be made into large gold statues.

Zombie News of the Day

Brains!

The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived.  It starts inMiami!

I was running late to work this morning.  By taking the interstate, I managed to get to work on time. But getting the computer started and clocking in took me until 5 after.  The upside is that I heard a very strange news story on the car radio.  I would have missed it if I had left on time. 

A naked man near an off-ramp attacked a homeless guy and started to eat his face off.  Police arrived and ordered him to stop.  He ignored them.  An officer shot him once but he continued to eat the guy’s face.  The officer had to fire five more shots to take the naked man down. 

These morning guys can be a little crazy sometimes.  So I’m totally shocked that neither one bothered with the most obvious comparison.  Naked guy thought he was a zombie. 

Apparently there is a cocaine theory.  Cocaine induced madness and it makes the person feel very hot, which may be why he stripped down to nothing. 

Who knew?  Cocaine is the trigger for the Zombie apocalypse.

The Scary Nature of Twilight Anesthesia and Dental Surgery

When I was 21 I had to have my wisdom teeth pulled.  The entire process was a nightmare when it really should not have been. 

Since I was going under anesthesia and would not be able to drive after, my mother took the day off and took me to the oral surgeon.  It was a house renovated into a dental surgery.  It was a cute house.  It was a cute office.  The receptionist/assistant was not so cute.  It was her personality and not her appearance.   She was a nice enough looking, 30-something, mother-like person. 

I went up to the counter to check in.  She didn’t talk to me, she spoke to my mother.  “She can’t be coming in to get her wisdom teeth removed, she is too young.”

“I am 21.”  Note that I replied.  Not my mother.  It was a long time ago, I may have been 20.  Either way, that exact number doesn’t matter too much in the face of what she said next.

“Oh, I’m sorry.  You look about 13 to me.”  She spoke to me this time.  It might have ended there is she didn’t continue to talk to me and treat me like I was a 13 year old.

I sit down in the dental chair and they explain the Twilight Anesthesia to me.  They need to use it because it won’t put me completely under.  I’ll be able to listen and follow instructions.  But it blocks the memory and the brain doesn’t record properly so I won’t remember what happens.  The last memory I had was the Dental Surgeon coming in, pulling up a stool and introducing himself.

The next thing I remember is waking up on a small cot in a tiny, dark room with a sink.  I think it was a bathroom converted into a recovery room.  But it was CREEPY!  Tiny. Dark. I was on a cot.  I had no memory.  Tell me this isn’t a creepy thing to happen. 

Apparently, I freaked out a bit.  Next thing I know my mom is in there with me but I have no memory of what happened between asking where I was, why I was on a cot and what happened to me and my mom being suddenly in the room.  I had sporadic memory gaps for about another half hour. 

I have a memory of either the doctor or the assistant telling my mom I was a model patient until after the operation.  They apparently didn’t appreciate my being upset about how I found myself during my first actual memory afterwards.

Tell me, if you were a young woman who just had surgery w/ a male doctor and you woke up in the dark what looked like a closet with a bed and no memory of what happened and how you got there, wouldn’t you be upset and freak out as well?

I then am given a prescription for pain killers.  They have to be taken on a full stomach.  But I had to go there on an empty stomach for the anesthesia.  And they give a one dose of the pain killer on the empty stomach.  I also can’t eat anything solid for a day or two.  So I’m left with shakes and broths and liquids.  The end result is I start off with the pain killers making me throw up all the time.  Because of the empty stomach. 

I lost something like 10 pounds in one week.  Unfortunately, when you lose weight that way, it piles back on the first time you eat a proper meal.