Sidious, Snoke and Salacious B Crumb’s Sarcastic and Sassy Situation Saloon (Fanfic Social Thread)

I am publishing my current project concurrently on another site, and I just saw that I have one more review for it, but I am terrified to look at it.

Edit: I can breathe a sigh of relief, they are reviewing chapter 1. I make more controversial decisions in subsequent chapters, including playing very fast and loose with the rules of the Force.

 

I have my long-time Transformers project on two sites. One site was where we posted our crack fic epic and our April fool’s day pranks and backstory. Everyone knew us for being hilarious and unexpected. On the other site, we have posted everything deep and far-reaching first and it’s really annoying that people aren’t responding as much to our newest crack fic. Those things are my specialties. So I get the anxiety over new reviews.

I went to the last concert of Thierry Fischer, who retired from leading the Utah Symphony four hours ago. The concert was incredible, with the choir provided by the women of the famous Tabernacle Choir. Lots of us were crying by the end. And then we gave him a nine-minute standing ovation and the crying got more widespread.

I’ve got tickets to The Force Awakens film in concert next month and then my 12 years of having season tickets are over. I might be able to go to their summer festival for work or fun.

 

I'm back home from three days of kayaking... technically. You see, I paddled my regular kayak (a Pyranha Machno) with the group I went with on Friday and Saturday, doing two different sections of the Upper New River (McCreery to Stone Cliff on Friday, and Glade Creek to Grandview Sandbar on Saturday). I learned a lot from the instructor and improved my overall confidence quite a bit. The Saturday section was the same section I had my first ever introduction to whitewater kayaking via private lessons last August, and I had a way-too-much-fun moment on Saturday when the instructor in the group swam in the same spot of the same rapid where I had my first ever swim last August. (He flipped after hitting a rock and was too exhausted to get his paddle in position to roll.) The sayings in whitewater kayaking are "everybody swims" and "we're all between swims" (no matter how good you think you are, you've swum before and will swim again when you least expect it).

But on Saturday evening, the rest of the group decided to throw in the towel; half (including the instructor) were too exhausted to continue and the other half didn't want to contend with Sunday's weather forecast (colder and raining all day). Since I was the only one wanting to paddle, I called up one of the local raft companies at 7pm Saturday night and booked an Upper New raft trip for Sunday.

It ended up only raining for brief periods rather than all day, and the fun part is that on the Upper New they give you the option of riding in a standard raft or paddling a ducky -- also known as an inflatable kayak. Of course I chose the ducky (the raft would have been boring anyway for someone like me who's done far more intense raft trips). The raft trip ended up being on the same section I paddled on Friday, so I was somewhat familiar with the rapids on it. The ducky handled fairly similar to my Machno, with a few limitations but with a lot more stability, which allowed me enough room for error to be more aggressive and practice maneuvers in the middle of rapids that I didn't yet have the confidence to try in my Machno. I think the ducky trip was actually useful for my kayak skill development as now I can take that practice and transfer some of it to the kayak.

Anyway, the person in whose cabin I was staying decided to check out Sunday morning, so I ended up driving home tonight rather than sleeping another night and driving home today (Monday).

 

Today in my daughter's class they talked about France. One of the other kids has relatives who live in Brittany, so the teacher had him talk about it a bit, and one of the things that he mentioned was crêpes. Of course, as soon as she came home from school (around 4 pm) Chyntuquita wanted to have crêpes, because she never had them before, and I gave in and said I would make crêpes. So I opened the recipe notebook and started gathering my ingredients, and Chyntuquita said that meanwhile, she was going to see her best-friend-cousin downstairs.

Fast forward half an hour, and I had in my kitchen Chyntuquita, her best-friend-cousin, the best-friend-cousin's older sister, the other two cousins from the first floor, the other-other two cousins from the ground floor, and a few parents with the two toddlers of the family.

It's now just past 9 pm and I just finished making crêpes for all these people, and I HAVEN'T HAD A SINGLE ONE.

But now, I'm going to put The Child™ to bed, and then, while I wait for Mr Chyn to come from the office, I'm going to prepare the batter for another batch, just for the two of us

 

I am dismayed I never tried Crepes at a fine French Bistro before it closed indefinitely.

 

I'm confused. I received an email to my school email account from the university this morning, informing me that I have a package at the residence office waiting for pickup. Yes, I confirmed it's a legit email. The problem is that I graduated in December 2021 and moved out that same month, and have had no ties to the university since then. Also, the section of the email that's supposed to contain details of the package is blank.

I'll have to call them tomorrow to find out what's up. There's a very slim, but nonzero, chance that someone sent something to my old campus address, although who or what would be a mystery to me.

 

You can tell you are writing a fan fict with your heart when you cannot wait to post next chapter.

 

@Chyntuck I was just telling a story to a friend that reminds me of yours. When I was a missionary in Southern California, we would often meet with members of the congregation and invite them to accept a challenge from us. One day, we told a family that if they read three chapters before we next came over, we would make them breakfast. Neither I nor my companion were great at cooking, but we knew how to make some fun things. So we came back the next week and made them French toast. Thing is, these people had never had French toast. We worked exclusively with Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States as our missionary assignment. This family loved French toast and told their cousins in the same neighborhood. When we visited the cousins and offered the same thing, they asked for French toast. Word got around and we started having people buy the ingredients for French toast and ask us to teach them how to make it. And that's the true story of how two 21-year-old women got a lot of people in Van Nuys, California, interested in French toast.

@jcgoble3 Mail can be the weirdest at times. Maybe it's a graduation present?

@Kato Sai I know what you mean. I've got two plot lines in one fanfic that are really emotionally interesting to me and I can't wait to get to where they intersect.

 

@DarthIshtar Oh I’ll have to check your fan fict out.
I finally outlined and wrote dialogue for my ending of my fan fict, which helps me immensely! I know what I am building towards.

 

Same. I try not to do that because in my first story on the boards, I wrote Leia’s execution at the end and then wound up changing the ending by the time I got back to that point.

 

I usually don’t write the ending, but this time it helps due to subject matter, its a Zelda fan fict.

 

@DarthIshtar I absolutely love French toast, it's one of my favourite Sunday breakfast foods. Before we swapped flats with my mother, my husband and I had the penthouse with the huge roof terrace, so in the summer on Sunday mornings I would go around all the flats collecting all the family's stale bread, and they all came over to sit on the terrace and eat French toast and whatever else was available. We had brunches that would last well into the afternoon. We don't do it very often anymore because we don't want to inflict the post-brunch cleanup on my mother (who refuses steadfastly any sort of help with household chores) and our current flat's terrace isn't quite large enough to be comfortable for the whole tribe, but I think we'll do it at least once as soon as the weather clears up

Fun fact of the day: in French, French toast is called "lost bread". In Greek it's "egg slices". I'm sure this is a food item that has a different name in every single country of the world.

@Kato Sai Quite frankly, you don't need to go to a fine French bistro for crêpes. They're really easy to make and it's a very forgiving food. The friend who taught me back when I was in uni was able to make delicious crêpes even when missing half the ingredients. The trick is really in the cooking, but once you've made a dozen you got this. There's also the savoury sort that's made from buckwheat, which is even easier; in its most basic form it's just buckwheat flour, water and salt, and you can't really go wrong with that.

And that's what I'll be cooking this weekend, because we had sweet crêpes yesterday, but of course my daughter has determined that she should try every possible sort of crêpe now that she heard about them. I guess it's lucky I didn't have buckwheat flour in the pantry yesterday, because I would have been making crêpes well into the night.

 

Love crepes, but have never tried making them. The whole "flipping over" part I find too intimidating to take a venture at. I had some years ago at a restaurant called "The Magic Pan," savory, with a filling of chicken in a creamy wine sauce. Think about that all the time. My latest culinary achievement is...Jello mold! I've only ever made Jello once, and have never tried making it in a mold. Was very impressed with myself! My other achievement today was potato salad because I want to take some for lunch tomorrow & can't be bothered going to the store to buy it. Only downside is I have no celery on hand. My mother always added a bit of celery for crunch.

As to fanfiction, I am writing a very silly Titanic story to share with some old school friends. As with many of my stories, it was meant to be short (5-7 pages). I am now on Chapter 4 and the ship hasn't even arrived in Queenstown yet!

 

@Mistress_Renata



Haha I haven’t had Jell-O in a long time. I’ll have to get some tonight.

I know how that is about fan ficts, mine keep expanding when yesterday I thought one would just be a short story.

 

Update: another email was sent this morning. The system glitched and sent a package email to everyone who's ever been in the residence office system. I had guessed it might be a glitch of some kind.

 

The anthology submission deadline is 6 hours and 22 minutes from now and I’m nearly done with an 8900-word Sherlockesque scifi mystery.

Edit: With one hour, three minutes to go, I have submitted my story.

.

 

That was a long chapter lol I usually don’t write such long ones.

 

My longest one was 13K words.

 

Woah! That is impressive.

 

I'm awake at 6 am on a Saturday morning because there's a mosquito in my bedroom. I don't know how that [insert expletive of choice here] found its way inside since all the windows are closed, but holy cow it's eaten me raw.

Meanwhile, Mr Chyn is snoring, blissfully unaware of the presence of the critter, so it's not like I could get up and go after it with a bathroom slipper.

I guess this is a good time to read fanfic.

 

I wake up at 6 because there is a cat in my bedroom. If the sun is up, it must be time for breakfast. Cats do not have snooze alarms.

Itchy bug bites are the WORST! Hope you've got some calamine lotion on hand.

 

Your cat lets you sleep in until 6 am! No 2 AM Zoomies?

 

Karel, my ringneck parakeet wakes me up at six

 

Well, he's getting on in age. He reserves Zoomies for 10:15 a.m., which is when all of my online meetings start when I'm WFH. So that half my time is spent yelling "What are you doing? Stop that! Leave the palm tree alone!" He then jumps up on my desk and parades back and forth in front of the camera, showing off his glorious tail and garnering maximum attention.

Fortunately, all my co-workers have dogs or cats and completely understand the dilemma.

 

So. It's been an epic few days in Chyntuckopolis. There's human news and there's cat news.

On the human front, I invite you to join me in welcoming El Chyntuquito in the Chyntuck family Mr Chyn and I did the paperwork to adopt a second child and we waited for ages. And then, in typical Greek fashion, a couple of weeks ago we were told "okay, we have a kid for you, come and get him." So we went and got him, and we officially have a son since Saturday morning He's five-and-a-half years old an he has the most gorgeous black eyes and we're already gaga about him and... as for his personality, well, keep reading.

On to the cat front now. Once Chyntuquito was home and we showed him his room etc etc, we all went to play in the garden, and we found an abandoned kitten, perhaps 5-6 weeks old. Now, I've been resisting having a cat inside the house for as long as I can remember, no matter my daughter's insistent requests, but on Saturday, she gave us this big song-and-dance about how it was for Chyntuquito, who had just come to us, and we should do it for him, and he'll be so sad if we let the kitten die, and Chyntuquito gave us the big tooka eyes, and he promised to take care of the kitten, and so on and so forth... so in the end I gave in and agreed to take the kitten upstairs.

BUT, I said: this kitten is a fleabag, so we're going to get anti-flea stuff from the pet shop (Mr Chyn, who always wanted a cat, dashed away) and we're going to keep him on the balcony until we're sure that the fleas are gone.

So we made a comfy little nest for the kitten on the balcony (Chyntuquito wanted to surrender his pillow), and we sprayed him with the stuff the pet shop gave us, and we petted him and we wined and dined him, then we wined and dined ourselves, and we went to bed.

On Sunday morning, I found the fleabag kitten in Chyntuquito's bed.

So I shipped off the husband and the kids to the beach and spent my day vacuuming, cleaning and doing laundry, the works, lest we find ourselves with fleas everywhere.

And then this morning, before the kids left to go to the day camp, they went to say hello to the kitten, and the kitten didn't look too well. I was planning to take him to the vet today anyway, so off I went – and the vet said that the kitten was abandoned for too long before we found him, and that he's not quite a hopeless cause, but that we shouldn't get too attached, just in case. Now try explaining this to the five-and-a-half-year-old who calls you mum since Saturday.

Bottom line: after all this waiting, I finally have a son. I expected that, during these first days, I'd be channeling all my energy into making him feel welcome and loved. Instead, I spent my time cleaning the flat and worrying about the cat.

*headdesk*

PS: The kitten doesn't have fleas anymore, so he's inside now and he's sleeping on my lap.