Now, not so much a fan. (Although I do like a little mashed potatoes with my butter now and again.)

There are, in fact, quite a few recipes that I love that my family…just does not. However, that doesn’t stop me from cooking for myself once in a while! Right now, what I’m craving is chili. And not just any chili…

Black Bean Chicken Chili

So I got this recipe from Cooks.com when I was attempting the very effective, yet very hard for a non-cooker to stick to, 4 Hour Body plan. It is amazing. Spicy, easy to freeze and reheat, yummy…I could easily eat four cups in a sitting. My only problem is the prep time. For someone like me, who doesn’t like to spend more time preparing the food (or cleaning up after preparation) than it takes to cook it, I don’t make this soup nearly as often as I would like to eat it.

My biggest issues? The onion, garlic, and chicken breasts. I’m not a chopper. I have a little machine that does it for me, but it’s a pain to clean. Also, cold chicken breast is so slimy and disgusting! Ever noticed?

The best part? Everything else you can just measure and toss in. And if you live in Pennsylvania, you need to buy at least six beers to make this, 24 if you haven’t got a restaurant nearby, so there’s a little something to sip on while it’s cooking.

**happy**

You can grab the recipe over at Cooks.com, and even get a word-search version which I must say, has to be the coolest thing if you’re cooking with your kids. Unless your kid is like my kid, and hates word searches as much as he hates my chili.

Why? Well, I like the idea of scheduled posts. Some people have a topic for each day of the week, rather like a radio show that has certain regular elements with their features tossed in as the meat of the show. So Thursdays are days to blog about what you’re thankful for (Thankful Thursdays), Tuesdays you post about your twins (Twofer Tuesdays), Sundays are for posting about what’s restful in your life…things like that.

Needless to say, you may have notices that I have no such schedule here. Not that I haven’t thought about it. Posting bi-daily is enough for me now, and you may notice that occasionally I am a little late. Oops.

But then, the A to Z Challenge…a ready-made schedule that bunches of other folks are also participating in. I’ll be part of a group! You can hop from me to the next guy in line by clicking that little box over there to the right. There’s interesting new things to read from interesting new people…

I’m looking forward to it.

There’s just one thing I’m not ready for, however, and that is that my A to Z Challenge has not yet got a theme. My Night of Writing Dangerously Table Buddy Chris has a theme. My friend Erin, previously mentioned, did her last A to Z Challenge on women science fiction and fantasy authors.

I don’t believe having a theme is a requirement, however it would make things easier, in theory, to come up with posts if I had a theme. Then I wouldn’t be rambling all over, daily posts with nothing in common…we just can’t have that.

If you have any ideas for me and my theme, let me know! Otherwise, I’ll see you on April 1st with a very big letter A surprise!

At first the jobs were very similar – photocopying, logging, miscellaneous et ceteras. Then, fortunately for me, my job description grew and developed into what it is now.

Marketing Goddess.

Okay, so that’s a little grand, but what I’m getting to is that I offer marketing materials and ideas for independent contractors trying to sell homes, and I’m good at it. I feel like if I decided to take the plunge into getting my own real estate license, I know exactly what I should do to develop my business.

But I don’t think I’ll ever make that plunge. The same thing that happened while I was working at the trucking company, seeing how the drivers’ lives were, has happened here. Sorry, not my cup of tea.

I sit at my desk, though, and I have all these ideas and opinions, and a lot of the time my agents aren’t willing to do what I suggest. I suppose it seems too radical in a delicate time where the environment and market is unstable. And when someone turns down one of my ideas, I think, “If I were a real estate agent, I would definitely do that.”

“IT” occurred to me in the past year. “IT” is that I am not all that different, as a writer, than these real estate agents I work with. I have a product that I want to sell independently, just like my agents do. I have ideas on how to market their services to the public – why can’t I apply some of my ideas the other way around?

I know how to do “IT”. I know how I would sell “IT”. I know that I can do “IT”, and that my ideas aren’t the ideas that anyone else would have (generally, I’m sure there are some similarities, but my stories aren’t anyone else’s).

And I thought maybe it would be good for me to share. I know I’m going to fight a bit against the opinion that the best marketing is writing more books, because once you have someone who likes what you’ve done, they want to read more by you, and why waste time with Facebook and Twitter and business cards and postcards and all that jazz? But I think there’s time for both. I think a person can churn out stories and still have a few moments for a bit of connecting to his or her audience.

So I’ll start sharing my ideas under this new category that didn’t really fit under any others that I had already established. I actually already have several, but I’ll try not to dump it out all at once.

Promise.

Author’s Note: This unedited spew is the result of a 750words.com session – I’d like your opinions, good and bad, but understand if it’s just too much to read. I’ve got a first and second part to this now, and it is definitely shaping into a real story. (Read the 1st excerpt or 2nd excerpt - remember none of these are consecutive.)

Abigail was slowly coming back to the world.

Admittedly, she had been hiding.

Ever since her phone had been destroyed, by her, of course, she had been concentrating very hard on something. It didn’t matter what, but whatever she did, it was focused. Clean the apartment, don’t think about Bob or Ted or Mother, just clean. The pinprick at the end of her tunnel vision was supposed to be light, but instead it just became another project. Get the beer, talk the distributor into the best price, no flirting, just business, and oh, would you please deliver?

Even when spending time with Elise, Abigail was focused on being normal. Not freaking out, not exploding…well, except for that once.

And then the other thing with the smoking.

She was going to try to forget she’d ever actually done that.

But lying there on her bed with her new friend beside her, actually voicing concerns she had but sounded too ridiculous in her own head to actually voice, Abigail found something.

She wasn’t quite sure what it was yet.

What she did know was that sitting in her room with a stack of magazines that Ted subscribed to but obviously only used for toilet entertainment wasn’t cutting it any more. She’d had her share of naked women, tattoos, and cheap gossip magazines she was pretty sure someone had purchased for Ted as a gag.

Now, she was restless.

The apartment was unusually quiet for an afternoon when Ted’s friends stopped by. She almost didn’t leave her room, but she was bored. It sounded like they were playing video games, again, and for once Abigail was interested in watching.

“Hey, Abigail,” one particularly infatuated young woman called out when she opened the door to her room.

“Hi, Tess.”

It was a bad idea to encourage the puppies.

She walked to the kitchen, and Tess’s attention quickly wandered back to the video game Ted and some guy Abigail didn’t recognize was playing. Opening the refrigerator she took out one of the bottles of iced tea that had been left with the last beer delivery.

Abigail looked at the group surrounding the TV. Ted, Tess, Brian, and two strangers. A small, eclectic crowd.

And none of them had anything to drink.

“Anyone want something from the fridge?”

Ted nodded for all of them. “Sure, thanks,” he said without removing his eyes from the game.

Abigail couldn’t tell. She thought perhaps he was winning.

Piling five bottles of the least drank beer in the refrigerator, she passed them out one at a time to everyone on the sofas, then walked back to the kitchen island.

She could still see what was going on. She still felt like part of the group.

But not really.

It was guns and cars, and Abigail really didn’t understand the game or who was playing, but it seemed rude of her to ask. She drank her tea, and was about to give up and crawl back into her cave when Tess stood, stretched, and grabbed a couple empty bottles and came to join her.

“Some game, huh? It’s not even released yet, and Ted got a copy.”

“Bootleg?”

Tess shook her head, perfectly coiled curls bouncing around her shoulders. “Dave works for the ad agency, and he got Ted a job testing it so they can figure out how to sell it.”

Abigail nodded vaguely. “Um, which one is Dave?”

“Oh, he’s not here. Bones and Bruce brought it over.”

The two Abigail didn’t recognize. Good to know.

“So I’m surprised we don’t see you around more often.” Tess pulled two more beers out of the fridge and handed one over. “You really made quite an impression the other night.”

“Thanks,” Abigail responded. “I was just really frustrated. Didn’t mean to make such a scene.”

“Oh,” Tess said, nodding, “I totally know how you feel. We’re all here to let go, you know?”

Abigail couldn’t help letting a laugh slip.

“What?” Tess asked, curious.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized, busying herself with opening the bottle. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

Tess’s smile was friendly and curious.

Just like a puppy you called to you so you could kick it.

Abigail hedged.

“Come on, spill it.”

“It’s…I’m sorry, there’s just…I mean, what do you have to let go of? You’re all kids with very rich parents who are bored. If anything, you need to start grabbing on.”

Tess cocked her head. “What makes you think our parents are all rich?”

Abigail gave the girl A Look.

“You’re hair. Your clothes. Your purse, which I am absolutely certain is not a knockoff, but the genuine article, and the fact that most of you are here so often there’s absolutely no way any of you are either holding down a job or still attending school.”

“Hmm,” Tess replied. “So you’re judging us?”

Well, that stung more than Abigail expected. But…

“I suppose so.”

“We’re not judging you,” Tess pointed out.

“Way to make me feel like shit.” Abigail’s response was muffled by the neck of the bottle she was drinking out of, but Tess smiled.

She’d heard.

“You should relax more. You obviously need to relax.”

“I don’t need to relax,” Abigail snapped, setting her bottle down hard enough to pull a couple sets of eyes off the video game for a brief moment. “I need to…I have to get…” Growling in frustration, Abigail stood up and started walking toward her room, and then before she reached the doorway turned right back around again. “I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I want. What I do know is that everything was perfect, and then what the hell did I do to deserve it being fucked up like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like this,” Abigail gestured at the apartment around them.

Tess looked around. “It looks pretty good to me.”

“But it’s not mine,” she said, sitting back down but no less frustrated. “It’s not even Ted’s. It’s his dad’s. Nothing is mine any more.”

“The beer is yours,” Tess pointed out.

Abigail sighed, deflating a bit. “I bought it for Ted so he’d let me stay here.”

“And the clean is yours,” Tess added. “And it’s a very nice clean, by the way.”

“Again, only because I needed a place to stay.”

“But it’s yours. Aren’t you proud of it? I’ve known Ted for a year or so. I’ve never seen this place so clean. I mean, even when he gets a cleaning crew in here after a really good party, it looks like crap within an hour. You know what you did?”

Abigail drained her beer and left the island to rinse her bottle. She didn’t turn to face Tess. “What,” she asked the tiled wall in front of her. “What did I do?”

“You made Ted care.”

“Yeah, right.”

But Tess didn’t answer, because Abigail had been too quiet, and the young woman was busy raiding the refrigerator.

That was the end of their conversation, as Tess walked back to the group and handed out additional beverages.

There was only one thing Abigail wanted right now.

To be alone.

Zen Dropbox by Nicki

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of working with a product that you knew once you tried it you couldn’t live your life without, but I have. It’s called Dropbox, and if you’re not using it, I would just like to say – why not???

Let me break it down really simply.

One, it puts your stuff wherever you are. No, not physical stuff, but all those little files, photos, and documents that you use every day. The important stuff. The stuff that when you buy a new computer, you want to move over.

Aha!

Two, it saves old copies of your stuff. This is great because I’m certain I’m not the only person who forgot to Save As… when I took that old document or graphic file to make a slightly different copy of the original. Then you hit save and your changes…not gone with Dropbox!

Oooh…

Three, it’s free. 2 gigabytes, no charge. If you pass out your referral link and get other people to sign up as well you get rewarded with more space. If you want a ton more space, of course, you’re more than welcome to pay for it. But if not…

And finally…

Four – did I mention it puts your stuff wherever you are? I did mean where ever. At home on your desktop? Done. On your son’s laptop? Sure! Your iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry? Uh huh. Oh, and you’re at Grandma’s house sneaking in some writing during that sweet spot between Thanksgiving dinner and pie? Log on to Dropbox.com and get at your stuff there, too.

I love it. I use it every day I’m on a computer, no kidding.

I think by far my favorite feature is that it keeps a few old versions of the files I’m working on. I was working on an invitation for a work event once, and I always flatten my Photoshop files so it’s easier to email proofs back and forth to coworkers. Except instead of duplicating the file first, and saving the original, I saved the original, flattened the file, saved again…

Ohpoop.

I had changes to make and no way to make them without recreating the file, except…

At work we always work out of our Dropbox folder because our main file server is across town, and it’s very slow to access directly. Like molasses in the Arctic. Something tickled my mind. Didn’t Dropbox save old versions?

Yes and YES! I got the old file version back, my Photoshop PSD had layers, and five hours of recreating work was saved.

I’m glad there are products like this out there. It’s a pretty wonderful time to live, huh?

If you are using Dropbox, what’s your favorite feature or best Dropbox story?