Froggy murder

Missing a frog? My fault.

I took the girls to the Burwell-Morgan Mill in Millwood today. After volunteering for their Art at the Mill show last spring, I became hooked on this beautiful old building with its inviting stream and strong history to Virginia. Now I go as often as I can so the girls can slip back into time and catch frogs. Well, that's the plan. If I hadn't captured them all and stuck them in a cigar box when I was about five, I'm sure the United States will still be overrun with the fabulous creatures.

Nothing could hold back my crazed enthusiasm for catching hundreds of tiny frogs next to my grandparents' home on the Applegate River in Oregon. I'd fill buckets with them, carry them up to show my grandmother who then waved me off so I wouldn't get a stray frog in whatever she was canning at the moment. I'm sure she assumed I returned them to the river but at five-years-old and only an old cat and a baby brother to play with, frogs were way more interesting.

The frogs were transferred to cigar boxes for safekeeping and so they wouldn't jump all over the house. Then...I'd run off and forget about the box. Weeks later, I'd find the source of the briny smell in my room: dessicated frogs. This wasn't just one time, Internet. I cleaned out the river. I've felt guilty ever since.

Lily and Vyolette built frog houses today in the stream, just in case any happened by. I hadn't the heart to tell them their mother had committed froggy murder years ago.


Orphaned lists

I'm wrapping the last of a slew of book proposals, some spooky and some are goofy-- all are fun with ghosts (for adults) and zombies (for kids) and monsters (for kids). I have a collection of notebooks scattered around my desk littered with notes to stunted ideas or ones that for some reason didn't find a slot in the schedule to develop more. Naturally, I didn't bother to write down a title or what they're meant for most of these so I'm at a loss what to do with the orphaned ideas.

List 1: (no idea what the * is for)
*severed head
eyeballs
*feet
*spleen
*earlobes
*eyebrows
*fingertips
*elbows
noses
kneecaps
5 beating hearts
*pair of lips

List 2:
500 Zombies (doing what?)
zombie -> vegetarian
zombie -> movie star
zombie -> pool party
zombie -> dating -- too easy
zombie -> college
zombie -> Gothic
zombie ->tarot reader, doesn't accept the she's dead. Keeps looking for the meaning of life

List 3: (turned into Betrayal for the ICE PICKS anthology)
Flesh-eating bacteria - frozen? Has thawed?
Viking curse?
Vodka
Ghosts
Polar bears
1900 - melting problem
Frozen guests
Ice blocks used to make hotel brings up Donner party. Last curse. Whispers. Insanity. Final melt. Sacrificed because he was a loon. Ice man on display in lobby. Convinces guests to kill each other. Blinks at the end.


Draft for upcoming anthology on speculative fiction:
Face it, zombies are absurd. They're nasty, disgusting creatures that thrive on human tissue - much like politicians.

So, what would you do with them?

And the tree tree tree came down down down

Friday night's storm was a humdinger of a hullabaloo. A little strip of nonsense at the bottom of the television screen as Syen and I watched the USA finals for gymnastics and swimming, when the wind started blowing sideways against the house and making the screens bulge and strain. I walked to the other end of the house and opened the french doors to the deck, my suspicions that the little thunderstorm they mentioned in passing may be more than nature kicking up her heels on a hot summer night.

The door tore from my hands as I saw leaves swirling the deck 25 ft off the ground, the girls thought I was mad to block them from going outside to see what was happening as the sky grew dark and a crash of distant thunder alerted my ears. I herded them away from the windows and checked on daughter #4 as she struggled with the garage door, she'd gone to make sure the dogs were safe and inside, and that door too ripped from our hands. I counted silently: power outage in 3...2...  

I didn't make it to one. 

I'm usually prepared for storms. Candles lit, flashlights at the ready and six gallons of water perched on the kitchen counter ready for brushing teeth and to bbq coffee the next morning if need be. This one caught me and the weatherman by surprise. I shuffled the girls off to bed while Bryan and I went to bed early and listened to the forest creak around us. An hour later, I heard the soft whooosh of a tree falling nearby. We have five acres on a mountain of trees, it could have been any of them. 

While it's very convenient firewood, I don't like to think about how the base of that tree is 30ft from my bedroom.

The girls loved it. A new plaything while we faced another 97* day and I marveled how it missed being anything more than giant shrubbery now.

The next four days passed in a dismal haze of extreme heat, library runs, clogged toilets, and questionable showers snuck in at the county pool. Last night, the mountain made the list of getting back on the grid and we fell back into routine: showers, air conditioning, and food that came easily from a container that wasn't eyed with suspicion.

Zombie Tarot handiness and giveaway winner


Congratulations to Carole  for her work with garden tools in the Zombie Tarot giveaway! With the power being out from Friday-Tuesday night, she looks how I smelled.