Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast

I have once again discovered my favorite internet radio station — Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast. The station pumps out lowkey ambient 24/7, and I like to play it all night as background music to sleep by.

I first started listening to Sleepbot in the late 1990s when I had first moved to Maryville and I was racked with chronic insomnia. (I should note that I was much later diagnosed with bipolar II, which explains the periods of insomnia). I would lay on the floor with my laptop and listen to the vague waves of music. I don’t know if it ever made me feel truly sleepy back then, but I would half-sleep, drifting among the motifs.

But then there was the wolves. One night I was half asleep again, only to hear wolves howling. Not the pretty howls we think wolves make, but shrieking yelping group howls. I slammed awake, thinking I had dreamed them, but the wolf track was real. I’m not sure why anyone thought that was restful music, but okay.

Photo by patrice schoefolt on Pexels.com

So, it’s years later, and I’ve discovered Sleepbot again using a wonderful iPhone app called Radio Garden (which, as you can see from the link, has an online presence as well). It’s now my nightly serenade and now I fall asleep to it.

Last night, I was vegging out listening to Sleepbot convinced I must have imagined those wolves howling.

I. DID. NOT. IMAGINE. THOSE. WOLVES.

There they were again with the most nightmarish howling by sheer coincidence.

Did I mention I love sleepbot?

Out of Commission Today

Abscessed tooth and pain meds. Sorry.

Happy Half-Price Chocolate Day!

Today is one of my favorite holidays — Happy half-price chocolate day!

I’m only partially joking. The benefits of chocolate are well known —

lowers cholesterol levels
prevents cognitive decline
reduces the risk of cardiovascular problems

Not to mention tastes good.

The problem with Half Price Chocolate Day in the US is that it features American chocolates which are, in a word, awful. They have a burnt-milk flavor and are overly sweet. I am not a world traveler, but I have had good chocolate. Lindt chocolates are pretty good, although aficionados don’t like them so well, calling them bitter. I have had very good Belgian chocolate, and I have had American artisan chocolates (with Burdick being one of my favorites), which are nothing like mass market chocolate. Yet I will sometimes eat American chocolate, especially if it’s half-price.

I would love it if one of you from overseas would email me some good chocolate!

A Whole Lotta Love (redux)

The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it only celebrates only one type of the seven types of love that the ancient Greeks celebrated.

So, those types of love:

Agape – love of humanity.
Storge – love of family
Philia — love of friends
Pragma – love which endures.
Philautia – self love
Ludus – flirtatious/playful love
Eros – romantic and erotic love.

Valentine’s Day only seems to celebrate eros, and it does so in a big, splashy, commercialized way.

I want people to reclaim the other types of love for Valentine’s Day and go out and celebrate them. Galentine’s Day is a good start, for those female friends who want to celebrate each other. But we should be celebrating our families, our friends, our flirtations, the world. Wouldn’t the world be better for that?

If you liked this blog post, please follow me and let me know you’re there! I need a little love!

Odd Things that Make Me Feel Nostalgic

As a writer, it’s good to examine what my personal symbolism is — first, because it may provide universal symbolism for my stories. Second, because sometimes my personal symbolism is so personal that it just confuses my readers.

I feel nostalgic seeing cars driving by in the early morning. It comes from being up very early in the morning as a child when my mom had to drive my dad to a pickup point so he could get to work. Mom would wake my sister and I up early and we would eat cereal in front of the tv watching the hog futures with Orion Samuelson (this is a 1970’s Chicago area TV reference) as it was the only thing on TV. Then Mom would bundle us up for a 20-mile car ride in a blue Buick station wagon, during which we would often fall asleep. The occasional car driving by in the dark reminds me of a moment when I felt the rest of the world was sleeping around me. I don’t know that this image would speak to anyone else.

Another thing that makes me feel nostalgic is antique auctions. I spent several weekends a year in my childhood at junk auctions as my parents searched for treasures. From rain-damp backyards to big, dusty antique barns, drinking small styrofoam cups of hot chocolate and eating hot dogs for lunch. I remember feeling special as very few children got to sit through auctions with their family. I once bought a box of junk for 50 cents and later sold the cookie jar from it (a primitive with blue cobalt glaze) for $9. Is there anyone else out there who would pull up a feeling of boredom and curiosity from the images of a junk auction?

Then there’s my experience with certain rock songs that use harmonica or sax. Think “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” by John Lennon or “Helpless” by Neil Young. I remember the first time I heard the former on the car radio (AM radio) half asleep in the car on the south side of Ottawa IL as an adolescent. The first time I heard “Helpless” was on an AM radio in my bedroom, and I was a few years younger. Very prosaic memories, yet these songs call up a portentous feeling of the past.

The caution here is that I could build these into my stories and believe I am communicating such things as nostalgia, such feelings as isolation or boredom, such universal moments that the reader will experience, but the truth is that these would speak only to me and maybe a rare reader. This is why I have to be careful as a writer to not depend on instant nostalgia to speak for me.

Home Roasting Coffee

My husband and I love our coffee, to the point that we actually roast our own. It takes an outlay of equipment and expertise, but for people who like good coffee, it’s cheaper than store-bought gourmet beans and a lot cheaper than a daily Starbucks or Nespresso.

We started with the gateway drug — whole beans and a grinder — and then I found out that one could roast their own beans with an air popper. It’s true; one can roast a pot’s worth of green coffee beans with an air-fired popcorn popper, although there are a couple specs on the air popper that need to be noted. Because it’s tedious to lift the hot lid of an air popper and stick a spoon down the chamber to fish out a bean to see if the beans are done, I bought a simple cylindrical roaster (which isn’t made any more; it was a cheaper version of this). It still only did one batch at a time, but it was a little more convenient.

Both the air popper and the Fresh Roast are what are known as fluid bed roasters. This means that the beans float on a fluid bed (usually air) to allow them to roast easily and not develop hot spots. Fluid bed roasters for the home user usually roast smaller batches (taking a half pound of beans at most) and don’t have much versatility if one wants to experiment with the depth of the roast (light, medium, or dark roast).

Photo by Chevanon Photography on Pexels.com

Eventually, as we drink home-roasted coffee daily, we invested in a Behmor 1600 (as they were phasing in the 2000s, it was half the price of the new model) and we roast a pound of green coffee beans a week. The Behmor will roast 1/2 lb-2 lb coffee at a time and uses a drum to move the beans for even roasting. Richard is our roaster now, because one of the important ways to determine roast strength is listening for the cracking of the coffee bean, and my hearing doesn’t allow for that anymore.

Where does one get unroasted beans? We use a source called Sweet Maria’s Coffee, a mail-order outfit with a great variety of beans ever changing with growing seasons in its various sources. We tend toward adventurousness in our beans, reading flavor notes in the reviews and choosing by those. Then when we’re drinking our morning cup, we rate the coffees on a four-point scale:

I wouldn’t give Grandma this coffee
Grandma drinks this coffee
Grandma should be drinking this coffee
Grandma called: she wants a dime bag to go with this coffee.

We like coffee in the 3-4 range (I’m old enough to be a grandma).

Even with the outlay of the roaster (again, we got it on deep discount because we shopped for sales), we pay a lot less than Starbucks, somewhat less than we would for gourmet beans at the store, and a little less than generic canned coffee, and we get a premium product that’s almost like wine in its complexity.

It’s worth the learning curve.

Ego, or Facing My Prejudice About Romance

I’m adjusting to the fact that I write romantic fantasy or fantasy romance. Fantasy romance is romance with fantasy conventions; romantic fantasy is fantasy with romantic elements. Given this dichotomy, Gaia’s Hands (the bastard child of my works that I’m currently editing) is fantasy romance, while the others are romantic fantasy.

I think I’ve internalized a subgroup’s perception of romance as tacky and trivial. I admit titles like “The Billionaire’s New Secretary” make me cringe because of the obvious and outdated gender roles (but at the same time they’re making more money than I am).

Romance sells like popcorn at a movie theater, at the same time that the readership of other genres are decreasing. Because it sells, I might have a better chance at getting my books read. At the same time, there’s part of me (the egotistical part) that thinks my books have to Mean Something. At this point I would best chat with my ego and point out that High Art sitting on my computer isn’t doing any good.

I’m not writing Books That Mean Something. I hopefully am writing books that people care about. That’s where I want to be, and my ego better clear out and let me do it.

Sleep can be a bad thing

I could be getting depressed.

Depression doesn’t start with a fall off a cliff into despair. Sometimes it starts with a desire to sleep and keep sleeping, a malaise, a disinterest in doing things.

Depression creeps in slowly. The long nap becomes the weepy day becomes the “it has always been bad and it will always be bad”.

I am prone to depression, especially at this time of year. I have bipolar II, which is a mood disorder that results in depression and hypomania. (Hypomania we’ll leave for another day; today is about depression). As I’ve said, one of the symptoms is sleeping a lot, and I slept most of yesterday away.

Depression is dangerous. When one gets to the point where “it has always been bad and it will always be bad”, suicide seems like a reasonable response. It is not, of course; it solves the problem but also kills the person.

I have been in dangerous depressions. They are fewer than they were because I am on good medication. But those don’t work 100% so I have to monitor myself for depressive episodes. Right now is one of those times.

Another Sunday Morning and a Little Romance

It’s another Sunday morning, and it’s dark and snowy outside. And cold, let’s not forget cold (1° F, feels like -14°). I didn’t want to get out of bed, but the thought of breakfast — French toast and turkey bacon — made me consider sentience.

So now I’m downstairs in a living room bundled up and drinking coffee and learning new tricks in WordPress (see that impressive drop cap?) while listening to the best of the Baroque.

Today I will write. More like edit the problem child of my years of writing, Gaia’s Hands. I have rewritten and revised this story so many times and have not been happy with it. This is another revision, as a fantasy romance, which I have been told it is.

I wonder how many of you have tuned out because I said the word “romance”?

Romance is the most denigrated genre of books, yet there are romance elements in so many genres. And yes, there are familiar tropes in romance — enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, reverse harem (woo!) — but there are in science fiction as well (cryosleep, generation ships, space pirates, and even interspecies romance!) I’ll admit a lot of romance is like eating popcorn — yummy, addictive snack food — but snack food sells because people eat it.

So, it’s Sunday morning and I’m going to edit a romance novel (and add more to it) today. And stay inside, definitely stay inside.