Crazy Days!

Allie Pleiter here.  This past week was a crazy/happy/busy one for me!

Last Friday I had the honor to accept the RT Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Love Inspired Novel at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in Dallas TX.  My book A Heart to Heal earned the distinction.  

I love a celebration, so I made the most of it, getting all dressed up and having a splendid evening with my friend and fellow nominee Lenora Worth.  Often our lives as writers are quiet and solitary, so the chance to get out and celebrate with friends is a welcome event for this raging extrovert!  It’s always nice to have our work recognized, isn’t it?  Congrats also go to other LI author recipients Janet Lee Barton and Jodie Bailey.

From one extreme to the other—I spent the next night visiting my new friends (four-legged and otherwise) at the Lucky B Bison Ranch in Bryan, TX.  The owners and I have become friends since I started researching my upcoming Blue Thorn Ranch series which will debut next year.  From evening gown galas to bison ranch pastures—I have the best job ever, don’t I?

Then I shifted again, this time to Austin TX to help my son move out of his University of Texas freshman year dorm and come home for the summer.  A large, tedious job made better by outstanding meals upon our return to Dallas for the flight home: barbecue, fried chicken, and pie.  You know how I love pie.  Pie makes everything better (and yes, yes it did).

Now life has calmed down.  I’m back in Illinois working away on the Lone Star Cowboy League continuity series that comes out this fall and a second Blue Thorn Ranch book for next year.  My diet had better calm down, too, although turkey breast and rye crackers can’t compare to all the Texan goodies I enjoyed!

Allie Pleiter on cake or pie?

It's a deceptively simple question.

Granted, it's entirely fueled by the fact that I just got home from Shreveport Louisiana where I spoke at the NOLAStars Written in the Stars romance writers conference.  Several other LI, LISuspense, and LIHistorical authors were there.  It was my first trip to Louisianna since attending the RWA conference in New Orleans several years ago, too.

I'll remember the lovely hospitality.  The people who called me "ma'am"--you just don't get that in Chicago.  The fact that it wasn't snowing there--oh, do you get that in Chicago.  The wonderful readers and writers I met while at the conference.  The truly outstanding yarn store I visited and interviewed for my DestiKNITions blog.

And the Strawn's pie.

Now, Pleiters are no slouches when it comes to desert appreciation.  There's a good a friend made my son a 7-kind-of-chocolate cake many times during his illness.  I have to admit, however, that I'd always thought of myself as a cake person.  I had also--for reasons I can't even name--figured the world came in cake people and pie people.  Doesn't the phrase "cake person" and "pie person" just bring up a different image for you?  Isn't it funny how our brains classify people for the silliest of reasons?

I had lots of pie during my visit.  Three slices in four days, to be exact (I hear the treadmill calling my name today).   And I've decided I just might be BOTH a cake person AND a pie person.  After all, they both go very well with coffee, and I MOST DEFINITELY am a coffee person.

What about you?  Cake or pie?  Which flavors are your favorite?  I'll start...chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie top my list. 

Back away from the refrigerator!

There’s a new technology out and it’s not the Iphone. It’s a refrigerator that will order your groceries for you.
Okay, I’m not afraid to tell you that I’m a bit skeptical here. How does it know what you’re using up? I’m betting you have to tell it.
That’s all well and good, if you like the extra work it’ll no doubt bring, but what it should be doing is scanning you to see what exactly you’re eating. I mean, I have a teenaged boy. And he has friends. I rarely have enough milk in the house and sugary cereals are an endangered species here. And I know my son. He’ll be opening this new fridge door and saying to it, "I’m taking a carrot now. We have only three left."
Meanwhile, he’s helping himself to the last half of pie. I’d be inundated with carrots before the week’s out, if this fridge believes my son and calls in an order of carrots to the local Co-op.
Now, what the refrigerator should do is scan the kid. It should use one of those beams we see on Star Trek and yell out in a loud voice, or better still, announce it on an in-house PA, "You are not taking a carrot. You are eating all the pie. Back away from the refrigerator. I say again, back away from the refrigerator."
Or wave its arms around yelling, "Danger, Will Robinson, danger! All the pie is being eaten! Danger! Danger!" Then grab the offending teenaged boy (because it’s not necessarily going to be my own,) and hold on until an adult can come to pry the pie out of his hands.
You know, this could work for dieters, too. You simply program into the fridge what you should eat and it simply won’t let you reach for pie, but rather grab you with those flex hose pipe arms and not let go. Why, you could work up a nice cardio routine fighting it off, and speed and agility too, trying to get the pie out of the fridge before it grabbed you.
Of course, your teenaged boy and his friends would consider the whole food grab a challenge. They do, after all, have a computer game experience. Or they could just reprogram the fridge.
You’d catch on pretty quickly though, when you opened the fridge for supper’s nutritious salad and it said something cheeky to you like, "Enter password within five seconds or this refrigerator will self-destruct."
Oh, yes, self-replenishing refrigerators are fine, but those scientists should be working on getting teenagers to eat three meals a day, all nutritious, with no snacking. Now, that’s technology worth buying.
Have a nutritious day!