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National Julienne Fries Day 2023

It’s 🍟 National Julienne Fries Day 🍟, which is the technical term for what we call French Fries or we might still call them Freedom Fries depending on how we’re feeling about the 🥐 French. Of course, the Brits just call them chips. Whatever you call them, they’re a classic summer treat.

Do 🥐 Brunch

On a perfect weekend, I’ll stay in bed until I am rested, though I am not someone who sleeps late. Then I’ll go for a run through the parks nearby, even if it is frosty and cold, and I love meeting friends for brunch. You know you are truly on a day off if you have time to do brunch. ~Birgitte Hjort Sørensen

And this has the potential to be a perfect weekend. I have no planned activities except to pay a visit to my son at his new digs.

I slept most of yesterday evening and well through the night. Even so, I’m still weary.

I’m not physically tired. I’m pretty well rested, but my head is swimming from an extended burst of extremely intense busy-ness.

I had a lovely hot soak to help alleviate some of the physical vestiges of my exhaustion and caught up on the news of the week in the process.

I’m in chill mode. Despite the actual 🌞Summer heat🔥, I’m feeling relatively chill at the moment. Not quite hygge, but at least pleasantly numb.

So, in this self-induced lovely Limbo, it’s time to disturb my hard won moment of peace with something that doesn’t come naturally: planning.

What needs finishing and what comes after that?

Planning, blech…

I know I’ve got tons to catch up on and finish for work. Doing triage on all that could be a weeklong nightmare, just to accomplish the planning and figure out some kind of schedule of execution. Sadly, I don’t have that much time. What I can do, is put my cards on the table and let my subconscious stew on it while I attend to other matters.

That sounds dangerously like procrastination, but it’s actually not. When I procrastinate, there’s no hint of planning. I have a vague endpoint and an existential dread of trying to reach it.

No, this is cognitive shunting. The thing is that I’ve been grinding pretty hard at work. If I focus immediately on work stuff, it’s going to feel like just another day of work in the midst of an enormous slog. I need to guard this little hiatus of mine. I will determine some specific tasks and endpoints. I will shuffle them calmly into my subconscious and I will gleefully move on to something else.

And what might that be, pray?

Well, I need to attend finish my July pins for Christmas All The Time and get August’s monthly done, preferably including those pins. That’s perilously like work, so it might not all get done today. I’m not here to stress myself out. I’m trying to maintain a pre-hygge state for the time being.

If I can get through most of that without getting frazzled, I need to do something about getting myself a predictable writing schedule. I’ll cover that after this short culinary message from the French.

🔪 Julienne 23244 🥔

Learn How Now: How to Julienne Vegetables

So, the term julienne is not exclusive to the creation of French Fries. It’s most famous for that interpretation, but it’s merely the act of cutting things into skinny strips.

For one thing, it makes for an interesting presentation, but also being a skinny strip makes it cook faster. A baked potato can take up to an hour to cook all the way through in a conventional oven but a batch of fries gets done in a few minutes due to the julienne cut.

That’s neither here nor there. I’m basically off of potatoes because of my dietary needs. I will confess a weakness for the tiny potatoes when you cook them in the pan with a meatloaf, a roast or a roasting turkey. I won’t eat a ton of them like I used to, but I will certainly entertain them as a minor side in a major feast.

My current regimen has me down to about 278#, largely due to the appetite-curbing effects of Ozempic. With a starting weight of 308#, that’s the kind of progress I don’t mind seeing. I’m hoping to get to 250# and possibly keep at it down to 210#. I feel like that’s actually my ideal weight.

Can you see it? I don’t know. I see me in the mirror every day and I don’t look different to me. Maybe I look like I’ve lost the weight if you haven’t seen me in a while. Who knows?

Oh, if you’re wondering what the 23244 in the section title is about, that’s the Julian date for today. Julienne Julian. See what I did there? 😹

Boundless

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Imagination may be boundless, but one’s lifespan is not. I have a lot of stories I want to tell and not a whole lot of mortal coil remaining to get them told.

So, this is why I’m feeling imbalanced on my writing journey. It’s easy to get caught up in daily drama and let it suck you dry. I have a lot going on at work and it’s not likely to ease up.

Fortunately, I have a counterpart again. When I started, there was another data conversion specialist working at the company. She moved on and business picked up. Being super busy is great for the company and my continued employment, but it’s not great for work-life balance. Now that I’ve got a colleague to help share the load, I’ll be able to actually have a regular EOB again in the near future.

That being the case, I need to give some preparatory thought to what I’m going to do with my hopefully upcoming freedom to work on my stories.

Complicating this is what I mentioned above about getting my September and October posts done early. I deliberately burnt that candle at both ends so that I could free up time in the middle to work on my 2023 Holiday Season Serial Romance.

So, once I get my August monthly done, I’ll be completely free to get on with Carol’s time on the page. Naturally, that’s about all I have right now.

I have a protagonist named Carol and a vague notion of how to use a Scrooge riff to set up a kind of silly love triangle. I used a Scrooge riff in Holly and Ivy, but not in the same way. That was a hallucinatory dream sequence for Holly Hannon to deal with her personal issues.

This one is going to use the Scrooge riff to set up Carol’s potential love interests and provide some story ideas for me. That’s all I’ve got so far. The story will be as much a surprise to me as to you at this point.

As for The Sentinels, I’ve got more words than you can shake a stick at. As I write, rewrite and re-rewrite this 13-part series, I keep sprouting new characters and the potential plotlines that go with them. After taking a break from the story due to work, I have questions about how events from the first novel will affect the thirteenth.

That’s a good thing, but it also requires me to rethink my perspective on *gasp* planning…

There’s absolutely no way I can pants a thirteen novel series. It’s not even an option. I’m not going to GRRM this thing. The best way to get through a complex task is to know where it ends.

As Jim Shooter told us at ComicCon, a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. He cited Little Miss Muffet in his talk on constructing stories.

I have a loose idea of how this all goes, but loose isn’t getting me there. Writing a story in realtime observation of the tale in progress is my natural methodology. Unfortunately, that’s too detailed, too granular.

To make the whole thing cinematic and consumable, I need to pick the thematically core beats and leave the rest to future fan speculation. Can’t have fans without a book for them to read, after all.

So, let’s knock out that August post and set my subconscious churning on the resolution of impending work stuff. I need to get those off my plate in order to really get to work on The Sentinels series. 🍂Autumn🍂 will be here soon, so I want to get things set for a genuinely hygge harvest season this year.