House Rules

I cook for 7 people, and I do it at least once a day. Since our family includes people with major food sensitivities, I make almost everything from scratch, including breads. I’ve never attempted to write out the list of kitchen rules, but everyone here knows they exist.

#1: Don’t piss off Mom. (No one delivers gluten-free pizza around here.)

#2: The kitchen sink belongs to the people working in the kitchen. (Wash your grease-covered hands elsewhere, and then clean out the sink. Remember rule #1.)

#3: Loiterers will be appropriated and given the title dogsbody. (Look it up.)

#3.5: Those convicted of loitering by the Court of Mom are stuck as dogsbody until Mom pardons them. (Sneaking off behind my back is bad and guaranteed to put you on the wrong side of rule #1.)

#4: The kitchen knives are sharp. (I mean debone-yourself-accidentally sharp. If you do something stupid with one of my knives, do not come to me for sympathy. You have been warned.)

#5: It is the job of the cook to taste the food for seasoning before it is served. (In short, keep your mitts off of it until it’s on the table. It looks bad when half of the meal is already gone before grandma gets through the door.)

For the health and comfort of all (rule #1), I’ve found it necessary to add the following non-kitchen rule.

#6: The tile floor is henceforth considered the only food-safe flooring in the house. (As I write this, there's a plate of pork chop bones on the coffee table in the living room. Maybe the words coffee and table confused you. Missing the family mealtime does not excuse you from eating at the dining table like the rest of the civilized savages.)

Productivity -- Or what a butterfly looks like

We have a concept in our house of something we call the butterfly effect. Our butterfly effect has nothing to do with Ashton Kutcher or chaos theory; although, it does cause a fair amount of chaos. It's the effect that can be seen when you interrupt someone, point off to the side, and say, “Ooh, butterfly.” When the person turns back to you, they've totally forgotten what they were about to say or do. That's the effect interruptions have on people. When they go back to what they were doing, they have to take the time to remember where they were in their thoughts and actions at that moment before the interruption. Each interruption magnifies this effect because it raises the risk that something will be missed or forgotten for good.

What I like to read

I don't have a favorite book or author. I'll read all sorts of things if the mood strikes, but for pure entertainment, I usually reach for fantasy. I'm a world-building junkie. Once an author gets me past the basics of engaging characters and a plot that actually goes somewhere, the thing that makes a book or series unforgettable for me is the world the author creates. Whether it's traditional fantasy, like C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy which is set on another planet, or the newer classification of urban fantasy, like Ilona Andrews' Magic series that is set on a modern Earth that has slightly different rules than the ones we're used to, it's the world the author creates that determines if I'm going to love it or trash it before I finish it.

I'm enthralled by authors who can take a world, populate it with beings or abilities that don't exist on Earth, give it a history and customs that should be completely unrecognizable to me, and craft it in such a way that by the end of the book, it's not only familiar but comfortable. I love a good fantasy book so much that I feel shortchanged if the author doesn't follow up with another story set in the same universe. I enjoy the time I spend reading them, and I want to visit those worlds again, so I tend to stick with authors who write series, rather than one-offs.