I knew it had been a while since my last post, but I hadn’t realized almost a month had passed. Oops.

I’ve just been a busy gal. My week of vacation started 2 minutes ago. No, I wasn’t counting down or anything, but I have been rather looking forward to a much needed break from travel and work mayhem. I have big plans to stay home and chill out. Reading is on the agenda. Turning into a vegetable on the deck is also on the agenda.

I’ve been spending large chunks of my weekends writing on the 5th book, and the first draft is around 2/3rd’s done. So with all of that going on, I kinda forgot about doing a post here. Writing is of course part of the plans for my week off work.

Both the cat and dog are enjoying being outside, except of course on days where the black flies try to carry them off to become part of a buffet. Louisiana has gnats. Maine has black flies, the larger version of gnats. I’m no entomologist, but I’d bet they both belong to the same genus and species of Bloodlettingus tillyoudropiens. Tis the season. In May the black flies arrive in the wake of the first tourists to cross the state line or perhaps clinging to the bumper of their camper. Maybe the black flies just carry the camper to expedite the process.

At my house, I grow black flies big and healthy. They love the taste of the dog and will swarm around a human head in a thick enough cloud to visually impair you. It’s impressive, though you can’t stand around and admire it too much without getting a blood letting.

So you may be wondering why I have big plans to be on my deck while in the midst of black fly season. In short, I never said I was smart. 🙂

Photo by me. Scotland. 2013.

I’m always fascinated when I stop and think about things and how they came to be. For example, the path I was on that I had NO idea would eventually land me in Maine. The path that took me to herpetology, to writing, to IT, etc. When people ask what I expect to be doing in five years my answer is always: “I don’t have a freakin clue. That’s too far out for me to know what will happen.” Maybe I’m not a good planner. Maybe I’ve just learned to wing it and see what happens. Do our long term plans ever really work out the way we expect? Mine never have.

So, what’s up with the pie? That pie has its own story or path to development. Several years ago I had Thanksgiving dinner with some Maine friends and was introduced to a walnut molasses pie. It was amazing, but I had misunderstood it to be a walnut maple syrup pie, and since moving to Maine, I will admit I may have a wee addiction to maple syrup. I got the original recipe from my friend and realized my molasses/maple syrup error. But I’d had my heart set on making walnut maple syrup pies.

Side bar: Our annual southern family reunions, everyone has a signature dish. I didn’t have one, but I wanted to bring something from the north to the south. This pie was my ticket, except I suck at baking and I had the recipe mixed up with the actual pie ingredients. Let the shenanigans begin!

Before I go further, you may want to review my prior cooking posts here and here about how savvy (or not) I am in the kitchen. I mean, molasses and maple syrup are practically the same, right? It’s just a simple ingredient swap. Right?

My first pie erupted like a volcano in the oven. Fortunately I’d used a pizza pan to put the pie crust on so the damage was minimal, except for the pizza pan which took an eternity to clean and may have involved a hammer and chisel. The pie tasted marvelous, but it looked, well, like an alien ripped its way out of the center of the pie’s chest.

I tweaked the recipe, and the second pie exploded in a slightly less dramatic manner (a smaller alien escaped that time). I made more attempts after more tweaks, bringing in pieces and parts from recipes for pecan pie and other pies (never did find a maple syrup pie online that didn’t end in some sort of disaster).

I started tweaking the amounts of stuff I used. More maple syrup vs less maple syrup? Can this be made without corn syrup at all? How important is the egg yolk in baking? Can I get away with using more egg whites instead? What about flour? Aunt Nancy never uses flour in her pecan pies, but my pies keep releasing aliens. Maybe flour will make a difference? Let’s give it a try and see what happens. What’s the worst that could happen anyway? Another alien gets loose? OK. I can live with that. Done it before.

I also messed with baking temperatures and times. Oh, that one came out looking like a briquette, maybe bake at a lower temp next time or lower temp and longer time. What will that do? I kept notes on everything. Do THIS next time, but don’t do THAT. Use more of A and less of B next round. See if that makes a difference. It was a true science experiment (and with a few aliens!).

I now get grilled at family reunions if I show up without these pies. The first year I made these pies for the reunion, I made two and they got obliterated in record time, even with one being burnt because the oven at the campground was wonky to use. The second year I made four pies. Three were gone and one of my cousins commandeered the fourth. The third year was a repeat of the second year. I haven’t been able to bring them to recent reunions because I’m typically flying in and staying at a hotel instead of somewhere that has an oven.

So as I did some baking yesterday, pictured above, and made two more pies today for friends, I started recalling all the iterations of this recipe and how it ended up where it is today over an amazing molasses pie and a misunderstanding about maple syrup with a side of stubbornness of: Dammit, I’m going to make a walnut maple syrup pie!

Below is the recipe that has been years in the tweaking:

Walnut Maple Syrup Pie

• 4 eggs (3 whites, 1 whole)
• 2 tbsp butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup maple syrup, dark or extra dark amber
• 1/4 cup corn syrup with vanilla
• 2 tbsp all purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
• 9″ deep dish pie crust

Image above, photo by me, 2016.

While most people despise the cacophony of shrieking cicadas, I love them. I never said I was normal. It’s one of the things I miss about living in the south. Maine has some noisy insects in the summer, but the south has bugs the size of sneakers. I have always thought cicadas (I’d love to see one as big as a sneaker) were some of the coolest critters on the planet. In Mississippi the trees would be covered with their old exoskeletons still clinging to the tree bark. If you were lucky, you’d get to see one still coming out of the shell with a soft and damp body because the new exoskeleton hadn’t hardened yet. So while cicadas aren’t really a new thing, I still think they’re interesting.

The new part of this post is I’m using new software to write the fifth book in the Burnt Mountain series. Scrivener is probably easier for some to use. For me, I seem to be a bit challenged in picking it up quickly. I’ve had to go back and re-review the tutorial a few times. I realize it’s just a different way to do things, but I said I’d give it a try, so I am. It “looks” like it would be just like working in Word, but there are some distinct differences. Each new chapter is a new document. And even though all the documents are contained in one big file and you can easily click between them instead of scrolling up/down (I do love this feature of Scrivener), I’m having trouble getting my brain to accept that it really is all one file. Again, I never said I was normal.

This week, work was updating our email servers. In the process it moved about 20,000 (yep, you are reading those zeros correctly) emails out of their organized folders and into my inbox as though I ‘d never read them. Four years of organized emails now unorganized. Talk about hyperventilating! They did a few things to try to fix it and managed to make it worse. Hyperventilating and biting nails now. The only thing that kept me from completely losing my shit was that my original Outlook account was still intact; it was the new version that was hosed. So they completely deep sixed my “new” account to start over and recreate it again instead of migrating my account. Work couldn’t understand why during the email debacle I kept saying “This will NOT work. This is NOT acceptable, and I CAN’T use it like this” until I finally explained how my brain works. Again, not normal and I’m certain it’s got a double whammy of OCD plus ADHD.

I need a certain amount of organization to function. Yes, I can take a vacation and not have a single hotel reservation and wing it and be just fine. But when it comes to work, I have to be organized and on top of things. Do you really want a scatterbrained nut bar building the system that will house your electronic medical records? No. Of course not. I need a similar level of organization with writing. So while I keep slugging away at using the new Scrivener software, I’m still trying to figure out how to get it organized in a way that will cooperate with my brain. Word didn’t cooperate with my synapses either, but I figured out how to make the two work. I have not given up yet on Scrivener because I believe the potential is there for the software and my brain to sync… which will get wicked interesting wicked fast when that happens.

Image from sxc.hu

After all the craziness of being away in MD for 6 weeks then coming home to get submerged in massive, unexpected home repairs, I finally took a moment to breathe and realized I forgot to let folks know I had signed copies of the 4th book, Burnt Mountain Rhyllia, the next to last installment in the Burnt Mountain series.

From the website you can use the Order Books tab or give me shout out in the comments or via fb. Lots of ways we can do this. 🙂

Last post I talked about being flexible with the ability to zig when you planned to zag and vice versa. That post apparently put some nasty juju on me. Since getting home from MD, my world has been nothing but a series of zags, zigs, sideways, and upside down. I’m not really complaining, but I’m smart enough to not ask that question: “What else can go wrong?” …because I DON’T want to know.

I live in rural Maine and have well water. When the well pump or something else associated with the well goes amiss (similar to septic issues), it’s never pretty. Did that trick last winter and, hot snot, I got to do it again this winter. And then there’s the fun of seeing if the insurance will even cover the work.

My planned week post MD of being at home, working, relaxing, and just chilling out (pictured above is Finn helping me work one night, holding down the pile of papers in the binder that I needed to go through…he’s so helpful), really tested my adaptability which I will admit wavered when the plumbing dudes said: “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

OK, there is not a world or alternate reality where a plumber speaking those words is EVER a good thing. They needed to bring out the jackhammer attached to a tractor body to get through the ice that formed due to the leaking pipe. It’s been a mild winter here. Very little frost in the ground right now, but nooooo, I had two feet of it in my ground.

But, on the up side, I have running water again (still awaiting water test results to see if I can actually drink it, but ya know, baby steps). And while I’m unimpressed with the massive swath of mud in the back yard, the dog is having a fabulous time in it. He especially likes it when I go running after him through the house to chase him down and stop the endless tracking of muddy footprints everywhere. It’s a hoot I tell ya.

Post all the well fun, I made a trip south last weekend for our annual family reunion despite the nasty flooding in Mississippi and Louisiana. Had a blast seeing family and friends, then zipped back to Maryland on Monday for work. Big plans this weekend: lay low, catch up on laundry, work on my chess set scene in Cinema 4D, and write.  Be careful hanging out with me; I’m clearly a party animal on the weekends.