… another diary entry. Yawn.

I look at the stuff I wrote earlier this year, and the stuff I wrote for the Million Word Year (more on that later in this entry), and it just seems so much more vital and interesting than the diary entries I am mostly writing these days that it makes me sad.

Then again, back then, I had a head full of unexpressed ideas to sort out, whereas now, I am in more of an introspective phase. At this point in my life, I am no longer content merely limping along with a broken brain and a wounded soul, not really getting anywhere and just blathering on like I always do.

I want to change. I want to open up inside, spread my wings, and learn to fly. I have a lot of magic inside me waiting to get out, and I have gone as far as I can go with doing that in this lifeline. I need to grow before I can go to the next level and be able to reach out more into the world instead of living at the bottom of a deep, dark hole of hyper-security need.

I am tired of the safety that comes from taking absolutely no risks. I want the security that comes from knowing you can handle whatever life dishes out.

Right now, I live as through I can’t handle absolutely anything. And maybe I can’t, maybe I am genuinely incapable of coping because of all the pain and anger and stress and self-loathing I have built up inside me, and I will only live differently when I find a way to release all that and make room for the good things in life to shine into me.

But that doesn’t stop me from wanting strength like a vampire wants blood.

And possibly for the same reasons.

Speaking of dishing out, did my first experiment with my slow cooker yesterday. I grew tired of looking for a recipe that happened to fit the ingredients I have on hand without asking for stuff I do not have. And I talked to a friend online who said “You don’t need a recipe for a slow cooker! Just throw in food and liquid, turn it on, and it will become soup!”

Bolstered by this endorsement of improvisational cooking, I decided to do just that. I just grabbing a bunch of potatoes, an onion, and some baby carrots, and chopping them all up (my knife fu is so weak!) and just throwing them in the crock, then adding enough water to fill the crock most of the way, and then setting it on HIGH and leaving it alone for a while.

And for a first effort, and a completely improvised one at that, it turned out OK. I definitely cut WAY too make potatoes, so what I ended up with was not so much potato soup as stewed vegetables in a vegetable broth. And leaving the skins on the potatoes was a bad idea. It works fine in many situations, but in a crock pot stew, it only adds unpleasant roughage. Lesson learned.

But the big problem with what I concocted is flavour. It just doesn’t have much. This is partly, I think, because I didn’t include any spices in the process. For some reason, nothing I had on hand seemed to “go” with the mix. So I didn’t put anything in. I won’t make that mistake again.

The majority of the issue, though, is that I started with just plain old water, and I really should have started with some kind of soup stock. I was aiming for vegetarian friendly results, as my roomie Julian is a vegetarian, but still, there must be vegetable soup stocks out there that I could have used.

So some time in the future, I will pick up some cheap powdered or canned soup stocks. Those will let me make tasty rice pilaf as well!

Cooking is fun. It’s science that makes food!

What else… oh right, the Million Word Year stuff. I had been looking around for a way to turn the XML backup file of the Million Words into something readable by humans when I came across this simply amazing site called BlogBooker.

Not only does it turn said backup file into something humans can read, it actually turns it into a lovely professional looking PDF file with a Table of Contents, numbered pages, nice formatting, and even all the images in their proper places.

When I read that, my mind flipped. Twice. I could not believe this was a real thing, let alone that it was absolutely free. It was far more than what I was looking for, and I almost had to pinch myself to convince myself that it was real.

Obviously, I had to try this shit out pronto. So I picked a few options and sent the backful to it, and whaddya know, after it processed it, there was a nice PDF file of every one of my Million words.

But there’s one problem : the images did not come through. Instead, they have all been replaced by a “STOP SOPA” image from some place called kz.am

And at first, I thought that this was just part of yesterday’s anti-SOPA blackout… so I tried it again today. But nope, same thing.

So I sent a polite inquiry to the website asking what I was doing wrong, and of course, the instant I sent the email, I realized what it was.

All the URLs for the images would have had “millionwordyear.com” in them, and I let that domain expire, figuring I had no more use for it.

Well, joke’s on me, ’cause it turns out I did have one more use for it. D’oh!

So now, if I want my lovely PDF with the images in it, I have to either edit the PDF manually and change all the URLS to the proper ones, or just cave in and renew millionwordyear.com and hope that magically makes the whole thing work.

Or, just cut out all the image-centric entries. But then it won’t be a full archive, and I will have to cut out all the funny things I said in response to said images.

I would still have all the important stuff, like the fiction, the articles, the essays, and so on.

But I want the whole thing, images and YouTube links and all.

So I will probably renew the domain. Damn it.

So close, and yet….