Of Eggs, Pole Dancing and other Therapy

It's a good thing that I like eggs. I foresee many of them in my future. In the last couple of weeks, four of the cooking shows that I watch have featured egg dishes. In two of them, homemade English muffins were made. Until that point, I'd never really considered making my own. Jon, Lord of all things made of bread, caught one of the English muffin shows. He wants us to give it a try. As of this afternoon, I'll have seen three versions of 'foolproof' poached eggs. I'm still not sure about that. I've been a pretty big fool where poached eggs are concerned. We'll soon see. I've also been jonesing for Hollandaise sauce again. I'd forgotten until today that it can be spread on asparagus. That's healthy, right? In fact, I had been told to try to eat two of them a day to make sure I got some protein in my diet after the first surgery. I still can't quite manage that. But one poached egg and some Hollandaise could count as two eggs. That's how I'm counting it at any rate.

But eggs aren't Independence Day fare unless they are hard boiled and in potato salad. But I'm a bit potato saladed out – maybe. Potato salad tastes great with the barbecued chicken I'm planning for tomorrow. We'll probably have frite
s with the burgers today. And there will be apple pie. I realized today that since apples aren't in season, the all American apple pie is danged expensive for the 4^th of July.

The new cooking channel and the use of my older cookbooks as set dressing has resulted in a whole lot of new cooking plans. I have a tendency to read and use a cookbook for a while and then shelf it indefinitely. This was especially true when I was less proficient as a cook. Pulling out those older, more difficult books was a revelation. I realized that I could handle a lot of those recipes with much more ease now. So, I started reading them again. I have to figure out which recipes fit into this season.

All of this cooking frenzy is, in part, to make up for lost time over the past several weeks. The Cooking Channel is another reason for the renewed enthusiasm for my favorite therapy. I've also had a pretty crappy week. The bureaucratic nightmares continue though I may have finally stumbled upon the right avenue out of the mess. It's now a matter of staying afloat while the problems are resolved. No, I don't need the extra stress, but that's what the cooking is for. I could also do with a chat with Craig. News of the garden wars always lightens my mood for a time.

Demon Doings

We're still on track with the development of the Demon Under Glass series. The online release of the film and the new trailers is set for August 1^st. Worry not. There will be a loud countdown and perhaps a small party. The fans that have recently come into our midst have provided a lot of grist for the mill creatively. That and the writing of a writers' guide sparked some notions in my brain a couple of weeks ago. Just the other day, I started writing. This probably doesn't sound like that big a deal from a professed writer, but it was to me. I hadn't been writing anything other than this blog for quite a number of weeks. And while I get a great deal of satisfaction from writing the blog, not writing fiction was making me more than a little buggy. Everyone around me is far happier when I'm writing. This particular piece is prose, but it will be a script for the web series. T

hus I'm putting Simon and Joe into a situation that will let the actors have some fun with the characters. Along the way, it seems that the Twilight Saga was fairly well savaged. Simon really doesn't like that saga at all, and Joe is profoundly annoyed at being exposed to it. That aside, the story is a lot about how the pair are negotiating boundaries. I'm hoping that the reader/viewer will get the sense that something special was interrupted by some very creative Delphi related mayhem. Simon has not achieved any of his long term goals where Joe is concerned, but he has achieved a comfortable intimacy in a relatively short period of time. There are even moments where all that's happening is a brief dispute over how Joe does his laundry. The mayhem is merely a frame for their interactions though I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'll be posting the story online at this link: http://dragoncor.com/Demonsaga.htm later today

Mind, reading this will definitely spoil the episode(s) somewhat. There will be chan ged between this story and the script and between this story and what will go into the next collection. I wrote this on a tear in a very short period of time.

On Pole Dancing

I must admit that Jon and I have chanced to see the occasional pole dance. Well, we've seen enough to know the ones in California are largely lame. At any rate, we really appreciate the athleticism of this sort of...er...performance. But this past Tuesday, I came to have an even greater appreciation for it. We were shooting the second part of that fitness pilot for Dr, Paul Drew on Tuesday. Jon was shooting. I was mostly sitting and documenting. Part of the day w as spent at Isabella's Salsa Studio in downtown Santa Monica. We did various segments of fitness and posture. On a side note, I have lovely posture. That's not really a surprise. I'm a woman of a certain age who attended Catholic schools. It's part of the programming. Where was I? Yes, fitness. All of the segments are aimed at giving women the building blocks to become red carpet glamorous. And since exercising can get boring, there are a number of different types of fitness segments in the show. One is pole dancing for fitness. Isabelle led one of Dr. Paul's clients through a basic routine. Paulina is in fantastic shape but five minutes on the pole really did a number on her. At the end of the second take, I knew that there could be no more without her risking injury. Pulling one's entire body weight off the floor then contorting around the pole to end in a split is not anywhere near easy. Heck, just the walking around the thing and squatting and moving from weight on one leg to another while still keeping time to the music and looking sexy. Too much for me right now. Probably too much for me ever. I've yet to take on the Bollywood dance work out though I think that I will soon in my ramp up to chemo. Still, most of the crew, including Jon and me, found the pull of the pole irresistible. So, there we all were. And we were all sober! I'll get into detail about the nature of the show and the behind the scenes on the entire shoot when I have some clips to run – probably next month. But I must say that we really enjoyed working with that crew. It was the first time we've worked with Sunshine since Demon Under Glass. She was good then. She's phenomenal now. Somehow, she can take a bolt of cloth and a few twigs and make a gorgeous, warm room out of a blank warehouse space. We also had Cat Elrod from Blood Oath. She super professional but so much fun to have on a set. And she'll pitch in anywhere. We were very fortunate hat she was available. And then there was Dutch, the most gigantically tall sound man I've ever run across. Again, he was very professional and lots of fun to have on the set. He's super laid back – the kind of crew guy I really like to work around. It was such a nice mesh of folks that even the more stressful moments weren't that bad. Needless to say, I'm calling on them for the next shoot.

I'm off to finish that story and the apple pie and the barbecue chicken. You get the idea. I'll put up food pics later.

Stay Tuned!