Death Scare

One day in 1202 a boy named Jack told a legend to Trey in 1995.  A little boy named Steve disappeared on Halloween night, trick or treating.  A ***** took him.  The legend says that he was found the next morning DEAD!  One person knows what took him and that person is Tom Smith.  So Trey died of fright.

If you want to know what took him it will cost 5 bucks.

Note: I’ve been advised that the thing that took him was a ghost, but the author wanted to get people excited about the story, so he crossed out the word ghost and replaced it with a shaded box.  Nine years old and already a writer after my own heart.

Bubbles brought the preceding story home from school a week or so back.  He had written it for a project and set it rather unceremoniously on my desk in a pile with everything else from his Friday Folder.  I was tickled to see one of his stories because it seems like they all end up at his dad’s house.  His teachers have been telling me for years now that he is very creative and that they love reading his stories, which naturally makes me extremely proud.  As a matter of fact, his teacher invited me to speak to their class at his last conference when she found out that I write.

I love the way he ended his tale.  It reminds me of many of the things I wrote as a youngster.  I only hope that his love of storytelling will stay with him as he grows up.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Democratastic

I love the smell of democracy in the morning.  -Erica Acton

For all you Harry Potter fans, be sure to check out the link below.  Mr. Acton is one crazy talented guy, and you can find more of his work at Matchstick Marvels in Gladbrook, Iowa.  They have all the cool stuff in the Brook. 😉

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Another award!

I’ve been nominated for the One Lovely Blog Award again!  This time I was nominated by Rooster Lady Sister, a most interesting character.  As always, I’m flattered to receive such an award, but since I was nominated for the same award by our mutual friend Lindsey just a month ago, I’m going to let that post do double duty.  So if you would like to read my seven random facts, you can find them here, along with the people I nominated when I initially received the award.

And now, back to the grindstone.  I’ve got the day off of work, but I’m working hard on The Lokana Chronicles: Fog of War.  Or at least I would like to be – I keep getting distracted by other things that also need doing.  If anyone has a spare time turner, I’d really appreciate it if you could lend it to me for…um…a period of time that has yet to be determined.  I’ve got a crap-ton of stuff to get done. 🙂

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

You can’t promenade alone, can you?

And now I’m back on schedule!  Woot!

I was fifteen and a freshman the first time I went to prom.  I can hear it now: “How the…What the…Huh?  Aren’t those for upperclassmen?”

My freshman year, I befriended an upperclassman who asked me to go to prom with him.  I, of course, was flattered beyond belief and quickly said yes.  Since he waited till the last minute to ask me, I scored a great dress for a nominal price.  A couple of older girls took me dress shopping since I didn’t have a car and even offered to do my make-up for me.  Dressed to the nines, I was all set to enjoy my night, despite the fact that we were being chauffeured by his parents because my date couldn’t drive.

Friends and fun – what could be better?
Photo by Kay Kauffman

Here comes Miss Freshman, escorted by Mr. Junior…

Love-Me Plant Lady

I’ve been trying to get a bunch of things done today, so I’ve been ignoring my computer.  When I finally took a few minutes to check my email, I noticed I had a new one from my aunt with some information about where I could view my cousin’s wedding pictures online (I posted a few of them back in July when I wrote about the wedding – you can read that post here).

I just finished looking at the pictures.  They were awesome!  Aaron Borchers did their wedding photography and he did an absolutely fabulous job.  But that’s not what this post is about.  As I was looking through the pictures, one member of the wedding party stood out to me (and no, I don’t mean the bride, though she was gorgeous, or the groom, who looked quite dashing in his tux).

More memories from the year I turned twelve are this-a-way! Follow me!

Old friends are the best!

Growing up, I was the oldest kid in my neighborhood by a couple of years.  There were only a few other families with kids around as we lived in an older neighborhood.  A couple of kids were three years younger than me, a couple were five or six years younger than me, one was nine years younger than me.  The closest kid my age – my best and oldest friend, and my maid of honor both times I was married, she is awesome – lived three and a half blocks down the street.  While that wasn’t exactly far away, the situation didn’t exactly lend itself to easy visitation, either.

After my mom passed away, my dad used some of the life insurance money to replace our sidewalk (which really wasn’t sidewalk so much anymore as it was part of the yard) and to build a garage.  One day when I was eleven, my sister and I and the aforementioned best friend were riding our bikes around the newly-poured driveway and garage foundation (the garage had not yet been built).  One of the neighbor kids wandered over and wanted to play with us.  She and my sister were pretty good friends, even though my sister is four years older.  My sister has a talent for making friends – I think she was good friends with every kid in our neighborhood at one point or another.

Anyway, we decided that we didn’t want to play with her that day.  As a rule, I never wanted to play with this particular girl as she always kind of got on my nerves.  But how many people always love all their siblings’ friends?  Anyway, since we didn’t want to play with her, we told her to go home.

This didn’t go over very well. At all.

Six years old and crazy already

I hate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think all writers are a little bit crazy in their own unique way.  Tales about eccentric and reclusive writers throughout history abound.  In my online writing group, the Alliance of Worldbuilders, every time someone pops their head into the forum thread to join in for the first time, we try to warn them that we’re all mad here.  Sometimes, they happily throw their own unique madness into the mix right along with ours and hilarity ensues.

My own particular brand of crazy began developing at a very young age.  See, there was this boy in my class.  We met in preschool and it was love at first sight.  Well, it was love at first sight for me, anyway.  He wanted nothing to do with me.  But that was only because he didn’t know me!  So I followed him around the classroom like a puppy, from the blocks to the sand table to the picture books and back.

When we started kindergarten, it was more of the same.  He made my little five-year-old heart flutter so!  But still, every time he saw me, he would take off running.  How on Earth was he supposed to get to know me if he wouldn’t stand still long enough to talk to me?  If he wouldn’t get to know me, we couldn’t fall madly in love!

But then first grade arrived.

Two-fer Tuesday

Today is the second, which is the perfect day to write about age two.  And, lucky you, I’ve got a couple of stories!

I am two years and five months older than my younger sister.  For most of our lives, we’ve fought like cats and dogs, although we do seem to get along better now that we don’t live under the same roof.  I’m glad, because we’re all each other has left of our immediate family (by which I do not mean the families we’ve created for ourselves with our husbands, both of whom we love very much).

I digress.  I do that a lot.  Anyway, rumor has it that once upon a time, like say, before she could walk and/or talk, my sister and I actually got along pretty well.  Turns out I was a helpful little stinker.  Too helpful, even.  See, we had this grate in our hallway floor upstairs for the furnace vent and apparently I liked to help change my sister’s diapers at the tender age of two and a half, whether she needed a diaper change or not.  Being a wee lass, I was not exactly up-to-speed on the proper diaper disposal techniques, so I lifted the grate and chucked them down the vent.

Cricket is now a very helpful, sometimes too helpful, toddler of two.  He enjoys helping me change Thumper’s diapers, though he and Thumper are closer in age than my sister and I.  Thank goodness, though, that Cricket hasn’t yet taken it into his head to change Thumper’s diapers by himself – I have a hard enough time convincing him to keep his own diaper on during naps and at night.  For some reason, he thinks he’s old enough to go commando.  A couple of times, it’s resulted in a very large, very smelly mess in their bedroom.  It even led to a failed attempt at potty training.  I swear my kids are plotting to drive me loony.  Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Wait, I take that back.  I would change one thing.  I’d be a lotto winner – then I could afford the diapers.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

October Blog Challenge

 

About a week ago or so, I ran across an interesting blog challenge.  Officially, it’s called the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge.  That’s a bit of a mouthful, so I shortened it up a bit for my post title.  Anyway, you can find out more about it here on Jane Ann McLachlan’s blog and sign up for it, should you so desire, here.  I thought it sounded like fun, so I signed right up.

On the off chance that you haven’t clicked through to find out what it’s all about, here’s the gist of it: Write 25 posts in 31 days.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Ah, but there’s a theme: Each post should be a memory or reflection for each of the first 25 years of life.  From the original post:

It can be a personal memoir from your life, a reflection on turning a certain age, a recollection of someone else at that age, a poem or a photo, on the ages 1 to 25.

For example…

From this moment on

I’ve spent two days working on a gift for Seymour.  Little else has been done around the house, but at least I’ve gotten his gift finished.  Cricket and Thumper helped, too much at times.  Cricket was so funny – he kept hearing our song (you know, the old, “They’re playing our song!” thing) and looking for my cell phone, thinking that Daddy was calling because the beginning of it is Seymour’s ringtone.

Tonight we’re going out to celebrate, but since we couldn’t find a sitter, we’re not going to celebrate the way we originally planned.  Maybe it’s better this way, though.  We can come home, put the kids in bed, pop in Fool’s Gold and have a little popcorn, maybe an adult beverage or two, and since there’s no ice outside, I don’t have to worry about falling on my butt like I did when we first saw it. 😉

Since I’ve abandoned everything else, I’ve gotten no writing done, either.  Luckily, tomorrow promises to be a very lazy day spent at home.  Of course, by lazy, I mean I’ll be doing mountains of laundry and piles of dishes and squeezing in some writing here and there if I’m lucky.  Now that I think about it, that doesn’t sound lazy at all, does it?  Maybe I ought to stop into Casey’s and buy myself a lottery ticket on my way out of town tonight…

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.