I've had something so good the last few mornings that I had to share it. I call it an Egg McMelton. :)
For each sandwich:
Chopped onion, about one thick slice chopped
Another slice of raw onion, red is really good
Two slices of crisp bacon, or not so crisp if you prefer
Some lettuce, iceberg is fine, leaf lettuce is good, or spinach
A slice of tomato, optional because I seldom have tomato in the house
An egg, the star of the sandwich
The devastation in northern Alabama seems to have affected our member Stanman who has not been onsite since early Thursday morning. Let us hope that it is just disruption of internet or electricity and that Stan is okay. There may be other BC members who are having connectivity problems in this extreme weather, remember them also.
A certain amount of unfriendliness will be tolerated here. I just remove unfriendly posts and issue occasional warnings and explanations. But willfully pursuing another poster here with an obvious intent to cause harm will not be tolerated. Two people tonight went over the line and their accounts have been suspended. These same two have done this before and undoubtedly, if I were to reinstate their accounts, would do so again.
Yes, I do. Maybe that's why BC is home to so many of them and such good ones. Who doesn't want their daily or weekly dose of their favorite serial? Well...
A peculiar noise woke me this morning -- the sound of snow sliding off the carport roof. We had about two inches of snow last night. It's bright and sunny now and well above freezing so the fluffy white stuff is not going to last till noon but I'm sure the people in the ski resorts on the mountains would rather have it up there than down here. :)
We had a great time at the picnic on Saturday and Beth and I had an adventure in San Francisco Sunday complete with phantom elevators and aggressive potholes, I'm sure it will all end up in a story by one or the other of us. :)
Thanks again to everyone who showed up and made Saturday such a lovely day. And thanks to Beth for the good company on the trip.
And thanks to Piper and Bob and everyone else who kept watch on the site while I was gone. Piper had to do a bit of rescue Sunday night while Beth and I were out with my brother and his wife for dinner. Thanks!
We had a great time at the BC picnic yesterday! We stayed so late, we had to take down the tents in the dark. LOL.
I'll let someone else who's better with names list who all made it, I'm afraid my memory would fail me and I would leave someone out.
It was great to see some old friends and meet a few more new ones in person. I think we talked about everything from document hassles to where to put the period at the end of a quotation. :)
I don't know when we can have another of these but we can probably talk about it in chat.
There's a situation that has developed with a publisher of TG fiction. This person is a member of the community and at last report is attempting to straighten things out and make things right with the affected authors. I don't think much else needs to be said here at the moment.
The comment section attached to a story is no place for long running arguments. Especially arguments that have been going on for years and have very little to do with the story they are attached to. Thanks.
Well, it's becoming more and more obvious that we need to upgrade to Drupal 6. We've got several Drupal 6 sites now running, Stardust is on 6. So, it's time to upgrade TopShelf.
We're going to do a dummy version first, probably this week and then later, in a week or a month when we're convinced it's going to work, take BCTS down while we do the conversion on live data.
See you there, we're going to talk about how to narrow the field of selections for the book, even though we are still accepting nominations. Also discussed will be naming some "captains" for the editing, that is people besides me to take problems to. :) Probably other subjects will come up.
Today we talked about editing standards and decided on Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice as our editing platform.
The workflow will be nomination, choices and priorities, permission, conference with author, editing revisions, approval from author, final edit, proofing, layout, final approvals.
Stories that get hung up in the process will probably be allowed to slip to the next volume. We now have about 150 stories nominated, though some of them are too long. At any rate, we have no dearth of stories to go into Volume 1. :)
It can't make up its mind. First it rains hard enough to scare the dog with the rattle of big drops against the windows and roof then we have ten minutes of big wet flakes falling in stillness, then the sky whistles and chuffs and it rains again, drops as big cashews, twisted by the wind.
We had a productive but fairly technical chat meeting last night and hammered out some details of how the book will look and calculated again to be sure we can get 150,000 words into 320 pages of an 8x10 trade paperback with nice margins and typography. It is not only doable, I think it will be quite a handsome book!
Here's the idea, a trade paperback of around 300-320 pages featuring some of the best stuff that has appeared on BigCloset over the last eleven years and perhaps some new stuff, too. The book would be 6x9 inches, more or less, and retail for $15. That's around 100,000 words, btw. The book would be available to be ordered here on BC, through Amazon and possibly through other channels. There might be an electronic edition which would probably be sold for $10. And we might put the electronic edition into the Hatbox for contributors.
It's my dog Cuddles birthday today, she's seven and is getting a small bite of blueberry waffle to celebrate!
Oh, yeah, it's Groundhog Day, too, and bright and sunny here so that probably means six more weeks of winter for us, but luckily it's cloudy or even worse in most of the country. :)
A few minutes ago, Cuddles killed her toy Skunkie that I got her for Christmas. Skunkie had been on life support since Cuddles bit the squeaker out of the tail on Sunday. Now, both of the squeakers are broken and pulled out of the plush. It's the nature of dogs to kill the toys they love the best fastest. She's never killed a toy quite so quickly before, just 6 days; it usually takes more like four to six months. But she had never loved a toy quite as much as she loved Skunkie.
Skunkie is dead. Long live Wheelie, the toy that squeaks AND rolls like a wheel!
We've got rain here. After two days of sunshine it's back to rain again. It's getting downright soggy. I don't live in any of the mudslide-threatened areas but there have been evacuations and road closings. Even one of the freeways was closed because of boulders loosened by the rain rolling down the mountainsides and into traffic.
Properly capitalization in the title box really isn't that hard. In most browsers, if you just start typing the new title, it will fill in the most recent one, then you backspace over the number and retype that and the title is correct. But there have been a lot of misspelled, misspaced and miscapitalized titles lately. They look bad on the story and they look bad on the site. Sometimes titles are in ALL CAPS and if they are more than one short word long, I feel that should be fixed, too.
We've only had SEVENTEEN stories posted today. What's the matter with you people? :)
For the past month, from November 16 to December 15, we've AVERAGED over 19.5 stories a day.
For the past week, we've averaged almost 17000 visitors a day! For the busiest five hours of the day, we're averaging about 1000 visitors an hour. Sometimes, there are as many as 390 people all visiting a page within the same five minute window!
My dog has food allergies. Poor Cuddles when she gets exposed to corn, soy or wheat breaks out in a rash and runs a fever. I had a solution to this problem in that for six months I fed her nothing but homemade dogfood, guaranteed not to contain any of her allergens.
At the end of that time, I started adding back in small amounts of commercial dogfood touted as not containing any of those ingredients. Slowly her allergies returned. Yesterday, I made the decision to go back to homemade dogfood, at least for another four or six months to clean her system.
The site was out for about an hour due to an attack or just a clumsy bot hanging the site by trying to use the search. Search is off while we keep trying to figure out what was going on.
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
