Below are the 11 most recent journal entries recorded in Elizabeth Bartley's LiveJournal:

Sunday, April 26th, 2009
8:48 am	Anyone on my Friends list probably knows this, but ... If you're on my Friends list, and any of this comes as news to you, I'm sorry I didn't keep you closer in the loop, but just in case.... Was married in mid-October (Brian Kenneth Creegan = Kaz), out of the church I've gone to since I was a kid Expecting (a son, Robert Vincent Creegan) in late July. Major construction on the inside of our house in the Bronx has finished, and the cats and I moved up there last weekend. We're abandoning most of my furniture, but the rest of my stuff (minus three carloads) still needs to move. I've been spending occasional nights in Brooklyn packing. Packing goes slowly, partly because I've reached the point where I hate it, partly because I have to sort out what doesn't move, partly because the easiest stuff (books and clothes) are already packed. Well ... I don't actually hate to pack. I hate to pack more than a box or two. So ... I wind up packing a box or two and stopping. When that's all I have time for, or I have a bunch of errands to run as well, this is efficient. When I'm trying to spend all Saturday packing and running three errands that combine nicely into one trip, it's less so. (Though I did unpack two suitcases before leaving, travel down to the apartment with suitcases, do all the errands, had lunch with Mom, checked Mom's computer, and packed both suitcases, a laundry bag, and four boxes, plus labeled & sealed a box from last Wednesday. Still compares poorly with this morning, where I packed two (smaller) laundry bags and a small bag with spices, plus labeled & sealed two boxes from last Wednesday while showering & writing this post.) Still, last Wednesday packing finally turned the corner, where I have so much stuff packed that it feels like I'm finishing up. This helps my morale a lot. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
11:42 pm	Chili recipe in progress Ingredients: 2 cups ground turkey 1 (15oz) can of black beans 1 (15oz) can of red kidney beans 1 (15oz) can of chickpeas 1 (28oz) can of diced tomatoes 2 small onions 3/4 medium green bell pepper 3/4 medium red bell pepper 5 cloves of garlic 1 tablespoon chili powder 1/2 teaspoon cumin 1/2 teaspoon black pepper 1 bay leaf Preparation: Brown turkey to lightly seared. While turkey is cooking, mince garlic and cut onions and bell peppers small. Put ingredients in slow cooker, including all liquids in the cans. Stir. Put slow cooker container in fridge. In the morning, set slow cooker (with a slider) to medium-low, put on timer for ~3 hours before you return from work. Be an hour late. Results: Half the chili is dry (not unpleasantly so, just no sauce in it) but with a rich (mild) taste. The other half is thoroughly burnt and stuck to the bottom of the slow cooker (YAY nonstick surfaces!) What's there is wonderful on rice with a little added paprika, but about half of it is wasted. Tentative adjustments: Turn slow cooker down to low Add a cup of water (or broth, but it's got a rich taste, don't know if that's needed) Increase chili powder to 1 1/2 tablespoons Increase garlic to 7-8 cloves Don't be an hour late. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
2:39 am	To my cat Well, Brunder, I was just about to get up, start heading for bed, and give you your late-night dinner that you and Pilot-of-the-plastic-snacks have been reminding me you're entitled to for the past two hours when you crawled into my lap.  This is not how you acquire dinner.  Off you go! Current Mood: and still tired (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:19 am	Thoughts on fixing an automated litterbox Stray thoughts on unclogging my CatGenie so that it can drain into my toilet: Yay! I have triumphed over an animate nonsentient object! I love not emptying litter boxes, but at least they're easy bits of technology and rarely go wrong. The CatGenie is remarkably easy to take apart and put back together.  I'm nervous about the number of moving parts in it - complicated things are more prone to go wrong - but it really is well-designed. This problem had nothing to do with the number of moving parts and little to do with the CatGenie's design, except for the fundamental issue of breaking up solid waste and flushing it into the toilet. It's not Pet Novation's fault that one of my cats likes to eat plastic, or that plastic will clog drains. The Cat Genie really should have a 'cancel cycle' option so that I don't have to wait until it's done before trying it from scratch. I'd've gotten it done in half the time if I hadn't stopped at the first two plastic clogs (plus three pieces of loose plastic) and had kept looking harder, finding the remaining two pieces of plastic in the machinery. Between one thing and another, I put in an actual evening's work. I feel a lot more comfortable about the prospect of needing to unclog the CatGenie again. This could have been so much worse if the CatGenie had run and the clog had been discovered just half an hour later - I never really got to the cranky and brainfried stage. This would have been better if it had happened when the CatGenie support line was on call (9am-10pm ET) but I'm rarely at home then. People have made YouTube videos illustrating how to do various maintenance on the CatGenie -- and the CatGenie has a helpful support line and a PDF manual that's good as such things go.  That's an interesting sociological fact, but I'm realy not sure what it means. I'm a total gadget geek. Actually, the previous paragraph suggests that I'm just a total geek. Well, if I'm going to go buy machinery that's likely to have minor things go wrong while it's doing something disgusting, I'd better be able to do minor repairs without getting too grossed out. It's late and I'm actually tired. Goodnight, all. Current Mood: but happy! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
1:08 am	As Done As Possible Tonight I managed to finally get started on the taxes when I got home! Yay! Got the taxes absolutely as done as they can get tonight.                                     - Beth Current Mood: satisfied (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
9:53 pm	Vignette Business Integration Studio I'm starting to get the hang of Vignette Business Integration Studio, aka VBIS.  Since this is probably going to wind up being the primary tool for my job, that's a very good thing. I understand why what amounts to s/^[^<>]+</</ fixes the "org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog." error, or at least I think it makes sense.  Why this error only occurs when the .jar files VBIS generates is run from the cron job I have no clue. A little over two hours getting it to run from cron. Oh well, I had already missed the show my friend was in at that point. Bleh. I should do my taxes when I get home. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
10:08 pm	Intercon H: Mystery at Faerie Tale Reservation Extensive, but I think without spoilers. My Friday night game at Intercon H was Mystery at the Faerie Tale Reservation where I played Cinder Elena (Cinderella, of course.) The gist was Russian fairy tales, but we had borrowings from elsewhere. Other characters I remember were: Prince Fyodor (Prince Charming, Elena's husband) Forest Warden Red (Little Red Riding Hood) Baba Yaga Koschei the Deathless Father Grigori Kupek the Merchant His daughter, Svetlana the Fair Her sister, A____ A firebird Ivan the Fool Ivanovitch the Unlucky Sergei the horse G___ (Gina?) the fox ___??? The Wolf T____ (Tarnavotch is wrong, but something a little like that) The beast Al El-Din (based on Aladdin, of course) An American graduate student A Russian graduate student A mortal woman who'd half grown up on the reservation the Fairy Godmother (GM character) There was the big mystery we had to solve, or deal with another way. There were some villains seeking power (or other things.) There were people with problems they needed to resolve. There were characters with interpersonal conflicts. There was a political issue - some fables wanted more contact with mundanes, some wanted less. All fun, but it was a little light -- it could have used another plot or two. The game had a couple of amazing mechanics, one of which inspires me to use a derivative. It probably won't happen soon, though, because crash_mccormick  has already gotten bids accepted to Intercon I for a game we need to write, plus one we've been meaning to finish boxing for years, and I don't think the mechanic is appropriate there. The mechanics in question are the Impossible Task and the Favor. An Impossible Task is pretty much what it sounds like: you're given something impossible, or nearly so, to accomplish -- the classic fairy tale requirement to bring the skin of a salamander, or gather up seeds scattered to the four winds, or rescue the princess from a tower. The Taskmaster - a GM or a player - would give you an Impossible Task with typically two requirements (find the tower the princess is imprisoned in hidden deep in the forest, then enter the high window above the unclimbable wall.) You found ways to accomplish those tasks (I speak with the animals to find out where the tower is, then I use my carpet of flying to get to the top of the tower.) The Taskmaster either buys your story or s/he doesn't. If you succeed you get a bennie; if you fail you get a penalty. A few characters can assign tasks in return for something -- Koschei the Deathless had magical abilities he could use but typically required an Impossible Task first. If most characters entered the Enchanted Woods they'd have to undertake an Impossible Task before they could leave (they could leave succeed or fail, but they had to try.) Most Impossible Tasks had their rewards preset, but some characters had items or abilities allowing them to choose a reward: you could select a reward and then get an appropriate Impossible Task. And then there was the Favor system, building on the Impossible Task system. With some exceptions (e.g. the Beast couldn't court people normally, he had some sort of special system where when he wanted to court someone the other character had to succeed in an Impossible Task to keep him away) if your character wanted to court another character, you would ask for an Impossible Task. Typically the other character (or her guardian, e.g. the merchant assigned quests for his daughter's favors) had to assign a task. If you succeeded, the other character had to give you a favor. If you acquired three favors, you could choose to get married (the other character couldn't say no.) The favor mechanic absolutely applied to people who were uninterested, happily married, et cetera. You could make up the world's roughest Impossible Task, but you had to assign one, and if your suitor managed this three times, you'd be swept away and marry him/her. You could tell your spouse, though, and your spouse could also assign Impossible Tasks, so it would take two Impossible Tasks per favor. (I find myself thinking Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot.) I don't think it would work at all in most contexts, but it belonged in this one. I liked way they did magic items, too. Not groundbreaking, but appropriate: there were a whole bunch of assorted items out there which did various things (which you then got to figure out ways to warp into success in an Impossible Task) and after one use returned to the Enchanted Wood. It just worked well. I had a good time, though I hit my frustration level pretty hard when the GMs had some sort of snafu and thought there was an additional complication to stage 3 of a 3-part Impossible Task - I can't say more without spoilers. Then the important item we were questing for turned out to already be in game; the GM hinted heavily to help us find it, but we couldn't just get it because it was already elsewhere (in the hands of someone who didn't know it was important.) I got several compliments on my costume, which was SCA garb made by Thorny Rose -- though I couldn't remember the name of Rosamund's company at the time. Did track down the person who seemed to be most interested in buying one and told her later. The costume was amusingly appropriate: Cinder Elena's writeup said she was Undefeated Champion, "Best Dressed." This post is misleadingly light on role-playing bits because what I want to say about them involves spoilers, where yammering about the mechanics is fairly safe. Good as the mechanics were, they weren't what made the game. Just that couple of things I want to say about the role-playing that happened don't seem as unlikely to ruin the game for other players. All in all, I had a good time playing the game; thank you to the other players and especially the GMs. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
12:41 am	Intercon H Well, that's the last time I ever compose a post in livejournal's own system. (I just lost 30+ minutes of writeup to an accidental touch of the control + back keys. Firefox saved my subject line and nothing else. A basic text editor's got to be safer. Anyway, I'm back from Intercon H (theme: Heaven and Hell) from this weekend. I returned Sunday night and reading other people's livejournals about Intercon inspired me to return (after >2 years) to posting something. I had a good intercon. I ran Ghost Fu: The Jade Emperor's Celestial Tournament with crash_mccormick , jlighton , mnemex , and drcpunk . The Ghost Fu game rocked -- I'm still bubbling. And we've already talking about polishing it, preparing to ask our players what they liked and what we should have done differently (unless drcpunk  has already sent the email, but I think that was just to our list so that someone with a Unix box could use programming fu to do a mass email.) I think the single thing that really helped this run of Ghost Fu the most was the game blurb we posted to the Intercon H website: Twelve years ago the great Kung Fu tournament was just starting when the participants were murdered. Some contestants went to the Afterlife, but others found themselves with unfinished business. In the best tradition of Hong Kong movies, the contestants now return to finish the tournament. You want to move on, but important questions remain unanswered: Who has the mightiest Kung Fu? Who will win the tournament? Who will marry the ghost bride and give her a burial place? How can you help your living relatives? How can one avenge a father after someone poisoned his killer? Who killed you, anyway? We had a LARP full of enthusiastic players, many of them wonderfully over-the-top, some of them interestingly innovative. Oh - I think we gave them a fairly solid LARP structure to work from, but our players made it into something wonderful. It was great. Sometime on Sunday (or was it Saturday night?), crash_mccormick  mentioned he had bid both Jamais Vu and Presque Vu for Intercon I (theme: Intergalactic.) This evening over dinner I got an email from him saying that both We've been meaning to finish boxing Jamais Vu for a while - Foam Brain Productions ran it once and helped us box it by asking us questions. But there are a couple things they had to improvise, and we need to nail those. Running it again should help. As for Presque Vu -- well, we figured out the game premise on the drive back. (We knew the game had to be at one of two different points in the world timeline; we figured out which one, and fleshed out the situation into the beginnings of a game background.) Interesting game premise. jlighton  took notes on his Sidekick and emailed them out: I've already added the LARP to our wiki and the notes - with a few additions - to that section. I'd already done some brainstorming on a different (unnamed) amnesia larp with jlighton  Saturday afternoon when neither of us scheduled games. Running a successful larp gives an amazing larp-writing charge. Current Mood: awake (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 27th, 2005
12:55 am	Birthday and dieting It was a nice birthday. Various people called and emailed to wish me a happy birthday, which was nice. My sister Katherine was in New York, and Mom took us to Aquagrill, which is a very nice restaurant for dieting, and then she'd baked (upon request) a Splenda Angel Food Cake that I could eat a reasonable quantity of on my diet. She said she wished it had risen more, but it tasted good ... especially with raspberries. I've completed a week and a bit on Weight Watchers' Flex Plan. The scale said I lost ~3 pounds over the first week. Assorted thoughts: The Flex Plan goes nicely with my general theory that I'll lose weight if every day I eat no more than 1,200 calories while walking at least 2 miles. The Atkins diet also fit well (it was surprisingly easy to eat light on Atkins as long as I stuck to only eating when I was hungry) but I had to count both carbs and calories. On Weight Watchers Flex, if I count the points I am counting the calories (they're the primary contributor to points.) Having to guess at the point cost of food is frustrating. Eyeballing the carbs for Atkins was easier, and while I had to guess at the calories I didn't have to fret as much about it since I didn't have a specific minimum calorie count to make. (Keeping to a specific diet was easier still, but burns me out on dieting very quickly.) Logging points for all my food and physical activity fits well with the way I tend to obsess about any diet I'm currently on. I'll have to wait and see, but I suspect Weight Watchers Flex addresses both my dieting failure modes: learning technically-okay foods on non-calorie focused diets and eating too many of them, and too many successive days of <1,000 calories leading to exhaustion and burnout. I need a better scale. Buying one will make a nice project for the rest of the week. It's nice being able to eat fruit and (unbuttered) popcorn fairly freely on a diet. Not being able to eat popcorn on Atkins felt very strange -- not that I missed the popcorn particularly, but it feels like it should be a dieting staple. And I did miss the fruit ... though there are advantages to not being allowed fruit on a diet; it sometimes leaves me hungrier. Okay, scale on order. Or would be, if drugstore.com would let me. (The connection's dying. At least they can't bill me multiple times: the virtual credit card number I gave them is limited to a little over the order amount.) Did I mention I obsess about dieting when I'm taking it seriously? Just noticed the time. I should have been in bed half an hour ago, by now, per both side rules on my diet (not to short myself on sleep) and everyday common sense. Off to sleep. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Echo's Children on randomization (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 4th, 2005
3:09 pm	Off to July 4 hangout/gaming party Off to Stephen Tihor's apartment to play games and eat food and watch fireworks on his large-screen television. Diet food in backpack for me: 2 large apples, 1/2 cup lowfat yogurt (with cinnamon and Splenda), 5 pieces crisp bread; plus a Weight Watchers entree, 4 small apples, and cheese (Polly-O 2% individually wrapped and Laughing Cow light) already there. Food in backpack for group: 4 chicken sausages, 2 (1 slightly used) large cans of canned whipped cream with Splenda, plus Cool Whip, strawberries, and blueberries already there. (Stephen and mnemex and drcpunk</span> and I were working on a LARP at his apartment this weekend, and I left some of the food I brought there, plus drcpunk and I went on a store run.) If it hasn't gotten too much warmer, I'm going to walk at least as far the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge and catch the subway there. If it has, well, I'll just hop on the trains here.</b></a> Current Mood: joyful (Comment on this)
2:57 pm	Hi all Hi, everyone. I've finally decided to use the LiveJournal account I got more than a year ago. Most of my friends use it: I probably should get in the habit of at least checking it. Current Mood: joyful (4 Comments |Comment on this)