Making Mango Smoothies!

As you may have read in my last post, I managed to melt my little blender recently. This made me very sad. My Grammy read the post, and offered to give me her big blender. Very sad turned to very glad, very quickly!

Francois and I picked it up yesterday, and I've already gotten very busy with it. I made strawberry ice-cream and chocolate ice-cream last night, and mango smoothies this morning!

We didn't have much mango juice left, so it was a gently flavoured smoothie.

What you see in the picture is everything I used for the yummy drinks.

• One amazing blender 
• Three frozen, chopped bananas 
• That amount of mango juice 
• A bit more than that amount of milk - maybe double the juice amount? 

I put it all in the blender, pulsed it a few times, and then blended on the gentler ridiculous speed setting. 

It churned out two very full glasses of very filling mango smoothie. 

Tada!

A very big, very happy thank you to my Grammy. I'll post ice-cream pictures soon. :) 

By the way, for anybody interested in the latest Carrie Lion news, I've set up an account with Payhip and you can now buy the ebook through my blog. 

I'm waiting for printers to get back to me with a quote, and then I'll set up crowd-funding for getting started with actual printing of actual real-life copies of 'Carrie the Limping Lion'! Eep! :D 

I'm also offering everybody the opportunity to earn money by being an affiliate seller of my ebook. If you'd like to sign up, just click here. 

After I approve you, I'll send you a coupon for one free download of the book, so that you know exactly what you're promoting, and can write a pretty review or something. 

Well, that's all, folks! 

Everything is Breaking!

Three things are refusing to act as they should, at the moment. All of them make me sad. And all of them will cost / are costing me money.

Broken Thing #1: Smashwords 

Carrie the Limping Lion was meant to be released on Monday, and while you can now buy the ebook directly from Smashwords, Kobo has cancelled all of the pre-orders (NOOO!), and neither Kobo nor Barnes and Noble are selling it. Kobo still lists it as a pre-order; and I've just checked on B&N, and they've completely removed the listing, now. Aaaaaah! Time to look at a different distributor, methinks. (UPDATE: You can now buy 'Carrie the Limping Lion' through my blog, thanks to Payhip!) 

Broken Thing #2: My Piano :(

When I started playing a little while ago, Francois pointed out that the sound was wavering. It improved when we plugged an external amp in (or used headphones), so we assumed it was a finicky connection to the built-in speakers, and we set it up permanently with Francois' small amp.

But yesterday, while practising, it started wavering BADLY. And I could hear it through the headphones, too. And it isn't a gentle waver. It's very, very distracting. Which means getting somebody to try to fix it for me. Which costs money.

So much of sad and tears and NOOOOOOO! :(

I'd MUCH rather buy a new keyboard, with USB out, and new speakers that sound lovely on their own, and optional portability... Like this Yamaha (so pretty!!), or this one. But as you can see if you follow those links, they come with a bit of a price tag. Just thinking about it makes my chest hurt.

Broken Thing #3: The Blender 

I've been seeing this one coming. It's very, very hot today. Again. Candle-melting hot. So I decided to make ice-cold smoothies for breakfast. Now, as you might be able to imagine, the frozen bananas that I use to make the smoothies so cold are kind of hard... And today, my little hand-held blender just couldn't take it any more, and promptly melted.

Insert optional profanities here.

It's so disgustingly warm today, that I was more disappointed about the smoothies not being made properly, than I was about the broken blender! This is something that needs urgent replacement, because I won't be able to survive summer without those smoothies. I'll invest in a tougher machine this time.

Well, many visits to our cool shower are in order until we go shopping. At least that isn't broken! (I hope I didn't just jinx it.)