A little gale will soon disperse that cloud.
For every cloud engenders not a storm.
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.
Many thanks to our old friend Bill Shakespeare for once again writing a guest column on this blog.
Clouds
Monthly Archives: May 2019
Still more snow
The usual guidelines for setting out plants in this area is anytime after Mother’s Day or May 15th, whichever comes first. It’s usually safe from freezing, but this year has been a little different. When I first heard that it was supposed to snow on Monday, I really wasn’t worried as it had been so warm. And the TV weather persons didn’t think the storm would amount to much (they were uniformly wrong).
It started off with a bit of snowy rain. As Mr. Dog did not like this, we took our walk inside the giant hardware store and then went out to dinner (he is a Labrador, so of course he loves to eat).
But after the sun went down, the snow kept falling.
And it didn’t stop until all the trees were bent over under the weight of snow. It was about eight inches of snow here, a friend measured the snow at her house and it was twelve and a half inches!
Then after a bit one could see a patch of blue sky. And those big clumps of snow on the branches started crashing down as it warmed up.
So as the snow melted away I could see the mess left behind by the storm. I got out my trusty bow saw and quickly cleared up these branches so that I could get my car out of the garage. Unfortunately, the plum tree in front of the house looked to be a total loss, the main trunk had snapped. As I looked closer, I noticed that one branch was spared. I had thought about trimming this off, but had been too lazy to do this. I tied up the branch in the hopes that it would grow straight, and now I just have to wait for Mother Nature to quit playing tricks on me (for a little while at least).
The petunias in the barrel would have been a total loss, except that the deer had already come by and eaten them. 😉
Ace
It started out innocently enough. I ran into my friend J at the grocery store and she had a service dog. I said something to the effect that I didn’t know that she needed a service dog, and she said that she was just training the dog, getting him ready for the task of helping some unknown person.
So then we had lunch about a month ago and she asked if I would consider hosting a service dog for a short period. I have been looking for a new dog and haven’t found one (the dog must be well behaved, not a pit bull and have floppy ears). So I said yes to the foster, and now Ace resides at my house.
He’s a two year old chocolate lab. This is him hard at work at a class we went to (too bad I wasn’t working as hard).
We had been out shopping and he was just sitting in the car while I put everything away. If he is wearing his vest he can legally go anywhere, so we have run a lot of errands together.
He is pretty good looking and everywhere we go people tell him how handsome he is, but he hasn’t let this praise go to his head (so far at least).
He does get plenty of beauty sleep, here he is taking a quick nap, but he is ever ready to spring into action if required.
He is a fully trained service dog, but his first owner didn’t bond with him, so he came back to the trainer. Now he is studying for a new task, and soon he will be on his way to his forever home. But in the meantime, I am enjoying his company while it lasts.
Books
Besides just being a writing conference, surprise, surprise, there were also books for sale. And me being me, I just had to acquire a few new books (also a surprise). So what did I end up with?
Okay, perhaps there might be a few clues to improve my writing in this tome, which was the reason why I was at this event.
This book was also recommended in one of the seminars, but it was the cover that really made me purchase this. 😉
I sat next to this writer at one of the meals, and he gave me this book because we both think that dinosaurs are cool.
At another one of the meals I sat between a writer of “scientific” vampire stories and a writer of vampire erotica. (Scientific means that he created a plausible scenario for vampires to exist, and he deleted all of the Hollywood vampire tropes. Watch for his series V-Wars on Netflix.) For some reason they did not discuss the differences in their vampire stories. 😉
I also bought this book, because he had given me the free one, so I wanted to support him.
Not shown are two “romance” books that I picked up. They seemed involve erotic possibilities rather than love, and I threw them away because they were boring. I much prefer a good murder mystery (preferably set in England, because we know how murderous the English people are). Who knows what this says about me, perhaps I shall write a book about it for the next conference. Or not.
Write On
If you are reading this, then you have perhaps realized that I am not much of a writer. Here’s a small sample:
This picture hangs in a museum. Underneath the portrait someone composed a poem, in latin no less, about what’s going on in the picture. And one is invited to write their interpretation of what’s going on in the scene. And this is what I wrote:
In spite of all this I had decided to go to the local writers conference to see if I might pick up a few tips. The speakers were all quite serious, the agents were all quite serious, the editors were all quite serious, the writers were all quite serious, and then there was me. I like to focus on the peripheral.
One of the coffee urns had this interesting replacement pull (I’m not sure if is a monster, or perhaps some sort of intergalactic mermaid.) No one that I showed this to had even noticed it.
The parking lots at this fancy hotel were all down hill, so I did a bit of hiking through the cars. And you know how much I love window stickers. I’m sure that this car owner was attending conference.
If you’ve ever been to a conference banquet, then you know all about the rubber chicken (I wish to state for the record, that is not my rubber chicken!) (No offense Floyd).
If rubber chickens can come to these things, then surely Pteri would be welcome. (He is my emotional support dinosaur, so I really should get him a tiny vest).
So did I actually learn anything at this event? Yes. That I probably will have to keep limping along in my old style, with an eye for the oddities of life. And that is not all bad, at least from my point of view.