Saturday, November 22, 2014

What I've been up to

I am still finding pecans on the ground in the driveway. A windstorm blew through earlier this week and today will be my first chance to get somebody to help me pick them up. This afternoon. So we will have a whole bunch of organically grown pecans in the shell for people snack on if they want to.

This evening we are going to a wedding and have yet to buy a present. I guess Sheila is going to do that this afternoon. We found a new really good fantasy author named Martha wells. I got a free book in the mail from the publisher and we liked it so much we ordered a trilogy of novels. We will be passing those around the family to the people who like fantasy novels as time permits. She comes very well recommended by other science fiction writers, but I guess her name is too ordinary for it to have made an impression on me before now.

I haven't spent much time outside lately and I didn't go to the dog park with Sheila this morning. I did walk around the yard and check out what's growing (not much, but it does include Holly seedlings where we used to have and no longer want a Holly Bush. I Don't Know Why Dragon printed those words in capital letters; perhaps it is somebody's name.

An editor I know asked me to send him some poetry for his magazine. He publishes weird fantasy and horror and I sent him a few poems. He didn't like them, so I wrote a blank verse sonnet that was really pretty horrific. he may publish that & is holding onto it for a while. So he suggested I send the first three poems to another publisher. I did, and they were rejected there. He Likes to publish the same kind of stuff, so I tried to write something for him. However, it went horribly wrong and became grotesque instead of weird and menacing. You've probably already read it.

We are supposed to get bad weather tomorrow, after it gets up into the 70s (21C). I don't think we have to go out in the evening so we will probably be okay. I see that the bird feeder is still mostly being frequented by the execrable European imports: house finches. I did see a few chickadees there recently. They are probably the bravest birds, most likely because they're so small it's hard for predatory birds to get their claws on them. Or maybe their heads are so small they aren't smart enough to be afraid.

Yesterday I attended a very enjoyable talk about the Hodges meteorite. Ann Hodges is the only person known to have been struck by a falling meteorite. It made Sylacauga Alabama famous for something besides its boring white marble (I believe that Sylacauga is an Indian word that means boring rock). Anyway, a friend of mine was a witness to the event; he was five years old in 1954 when it happened. Now he is a great storyteller and gave us an entertaining lunch hour

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