Most people enjoying the mind-boggling sculpture room will miss the boars atop the entry way:
After traversing the whole museum to find The Code of Hammurabi, we traipsed back. Came upon this room.
More in the same room:
On the entry to one of the rooms:
You toil for years and years, quietly putting words on the screen, deleting them, putting them on there again… kind of lonely, but it’s your life. Then one day, everything happens at once.
Disappointment was quickly replaced by relief when I learned my first-published story, The Last Straw, wasn’t coming out until November 13th. Ah, I said, leaning back in my chair, linking my fingers in front of me and stretching my back. Plenty of time to figure out some promo ideas. More like pick a few ideas out of a gazillion available in this writer’s sphere that has gone from quiet and lonely to tweetingly, bloggingly, noisily busy.
Well, my publisher (love saying that) just released The Last Straw for a 3 month exclusive on Kindle Direct Publishing! (The book will go out to all retail outlets 11/13.)
What’s that popping sound you hear? Yes, it’s the champagne.
Not only am I celebrating the release of my book here today, I’m also am celebrating…
A blogger award!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!!! The Versatile Blogger!
This beautiful nomination was bestowed upon me by the fabulous Gynji, whose brilliant blog domesticgeekgirl makes me laugh and learn and catch a glimpse of what it’s like to be young (which I no longer really can claim to be), pregnant (which I never could claim to be) and married to a fabulous Navy man (which I usually can only experience through Romance novels)!
The rules for this award are as follows:
1. Display the Award Certificate on your website/blog
2. Announce your win with a post. Make sure to post a link back to me as a ‘thank you’ for the nomination.
3. Present 15 awards to deserving bloggers
4. Drop them a comment to tip them off after you have linked them in the post
5. Post 7 interesting things about yourself.
7 Interesting Things About Me:
1. I’m collaborating on a novel with another author, a first for me, and I love it. I know a pair of authors who collaborate and always wondered how they did it, why they did it and thought I would never do it. They are an amazing team, though, and now I know why they do it. See #5 below.
2. I left my day job last September, a dream come true.
3. I started writing novels in 2001 and tried to quit many times over the next 12 years.
4. Quitting didn’t stick. I thought I was over it, but I started writing again 3 days after I left my day job. The story that was just published yesterday!
5. I actually loved my day job! I was a project manager and worked with really great people. I was sad to leave, but I’ve found I’ve recreated many things I loved about work: I have a critique group, belong to a couple RWA chapters, and now I even have a writing team for my novel(s). (It’s a series!)
6. I’m not a fast reader because I subvocalize. I think I’m an auditory learner. Or I just really like the sound of words. Both, probably.
7. I forget a lot of stuff but remember a lot of conversations verbatim.
Now for the best part, getting to acknowledge more hard-working bloggers!
A recent discussion in the blogosphere about contracts reminded me of a real highlight at The Louvre: The Code of Hammurabi. We walked our legs off, following the nearly incomprehensible map of the Louvre and tromping for what felt like miles through rooms of antiquities so complete it was like walking through slices of history. (More later on those rooms!)
Ah, but The Code of Hammurabi, standing supreme in its room, is well worth the effort.
The Code of Hammurabi is one of the earliest written laws, dating back to the Old Babylonian period. According to Wikipedia:
…dating back to about 1772 BC. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. … Nearly one-half of the Code deals with matters of contract, establishing, for example, the wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon.
Of course, its translation at the museum is into French. I did try to read it, but my French is very weak and I didn’t pick up on how much was devoted to contract law.
There are a lot of things wrong with my society. Probably there always will be. Hopefully different things because hopefully we will continue to evolve into an enlightened society. Seriously, can we get there already? But this relic made me stop and appreciate living in a society governed by law. Even if some of the laws seem about as outdated to me as the ones chiseled on this stone, and other laws we need don’t yet exist, we all basically agree there is law and, for the most part, we all follow the law. A civil society order affords the freedom to live, have property, not to be property, and to know what to expect. And this big rock did the same thing for the Babylonians. There in the center of town for all to see, it listed the rules and the punishments for breaking those rules.
The institutions of law compose a fundamental basis for a fair society. And a fair society is one that thrives.
(Wikipedia is worth checking out on this topic. There’s an earlier set of laws, for example, called The Code of Ur-Nammu, from a city-state called Ur in Mesopotamia. I just love all the words. Ur. Mesopotamia. Ur’s patron deity was Nanna (god of the moon). I want to write a story about Nanna and the king of Ur.)
Using this recipe: Eggplant green curry, by Garrett McCord, and substituting this overgrown yellow squash from the garden for the eggplant:
and switching out the coconut milk with coconut water, cornstarch and a little soy milk (more healthful), we made this:
which we enjoyed (relished) over brown rice.
Details of modifications:
Also added a few carrots and some broccoli. The broccoli, carrots and squash get cooked the longest. The recipe has you pre-cook the eggplant for 3 – 4 minutes, which definitely works for eggplant but not for our rock-hard gourd, the carrots or the broccoli. These items needed to be cooked for half an hour. Sear them first, then lower the temperature, cover and simmer until soft. You can see how hard the squash was above, needed a heavy steel cleaver to get through it and to hack off the skin.
To make the coconut water substitution, use 2 cups of the coconut water to get the boil going. Only add the slurry of a couple heaping teaspoons of cornstarch at the end, drizzling the slurry around evenly over the pot, stirring constantly so it doesn’t make lumps. Then pour in a little soy milk, if desired, about a half a cup, to make it a bit white and creamy.
We used 4 Thai dragon peppers from last year’s garden and kept frozen. The heat was a bit off the charts, not for the faint of heart.
This was a delicious, low-cal, vitamin-rich, and satisfying meal. Where’s the protein? you ask. (If protein is important, as it is for me right now as I’m trying to build muscles at the gym using Lou Schuler’s New Rules of Lifting for Women program, which has you up your protein levels to 30%, which I track by using myfitnesspal.com.) Have some nonfat, Greek yogurt with slivered almonds for dessert.
In Capitola, you can park up on a bluff above the town at meters. These were filled so we parked on a side street beyond the meters then enjoyed the long walk down to the beach, the wharf, and the restaurant.
The light quality differs between the first photo and the rest. That’s because I white balanced and color enhanced the first one only. The others are as-is, straight off my Android phone camera.
The approach:
The restaurant:
The departure:
Nicci Carrera 