You think the honey badger cares?

So Chloe, my oldest, is home for a few days on a break from school. I'm so glad to see her, but having her here means a few changes in the home dynamic.

1. Her iPhone takes up an enormous amount of broadband and thus my online activities are curtailed. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm getting lots done on my WIP. Thanks to the beta readers, this thing is really improving. (Thanks, betas!)

2. Chloe's presence upsets the sibling dynamic resulting in all sorts of jockeying for attention. Again, this isn't exactly a bad thing - I quite like hanging out with my kids once in a while, but there's a shelf life to sibling rivalry and I expect to reach my limit by about 6pm tomorrow. She's staying until Sunday. So....I'll be chewing Xanax and washing it down with a cheap red on Saturday. Be sure to come back and read that blog post. It promises to be a dilly.

2.1. The cats aren't sure what to do with this person who is actually interested in picking them up and carrying them around like babies. I've heard talk of dressing them in doll clothes and enacting scenes from Jane Austen novels. And the cats thought the fleas were nuisances.

3. I get to hear what's going on with Chloe and her friends. I'm sure this is heavily filtered. As it should be. I can still remember the look on my own mother's face when I tried to explain to her what a ......well, nevermind. Let's just say her response began with "Is that legal?"

4. We get to discuss Pinterest and read recipes aloud to each other. The result? A chocolate chess pie in the oven.

5. I cook more. More specifically, I bake more. (See above.)

6. I get to experience new things. Like this:

And this:

 

After that honey badger video, you'd think I wouldn't be hungry. You would be wrong. Who's ready for some pie?

Thrown

 Sometimes he finishes my sentences and gets it right. Sometimes he finishes my sentences and I want to throw something at him. And I've been known to throw things. Fits. Unopened cans of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup. Cellphones. The bathwater out and that damned baby, too.

"The thing that drives me crazy about this..." that was me. My line. My mistake is trying to reduce it, whatever it is, to just one thing. The thing that drives me crazy. As if.

I know, I know, on top of writing, you're the one doing all the housework. That was him.

True, but that wasn't what I was going to say. I may have snarled. I didn't throw anything. "Yes, but..."

He tried again. I know the money worries me, too.

Wrong again. Well, I mean, he was right. Of course the money stuff is worrying me to no end. I swear that at least 50% of my excess body fat is due to that fucking stress hormone, but no, I was going to say something more specific about money.

"Listen to me!" Now there's a universal cry if ever there was one. "What makes it so hard to focus sometimes is that when I had a job, I showed up, I did my job, I got paid. It was a given. Now! Now, there's a very real possibility that I'll do all this work - the writing, the editing, the fretting over finding an agent  - all this time spent on this and there's no guarantee that I'll ever be paid a cent for it."

Saying it didn't make it better. I felt flattened, defeated, over it. Why can't I just find a real job? A job with a paycheck? How did I go from being capable of managing an organization to being unemployable?

"There's one sure fire way to guarantee that you don't get paid for it," he said quickly so I couldn't cut in. It was my turn to finish his sentence. I must have had that look in my eye. "Don't finish it. Don't put it out there. Don't try to find an agent or to publish it on your own. There's your guaranteed failure right there."

There's nothing left to say. I turn back to the computer and get back to work.

What throws you?

30 Day Photography Challenge - One last bit of self reflection

Hey, loser! Why don't you just go get a job?!?!

 
Summer has some thoughts on raising children that I enthusiastically endorse. Hey, my kids have turned out just fine. What? Don't look at me in that tone of voice.*

Bonus alert! Randal whistles past the graveyard.  And it's a wrap!

UPDATED: We get the many sides of Geoffrey.

UPDATED TWICE! Summer love in bright light.

Thanks to those of you who've stuck with me through this challenge. It's turned out to be a great writing prompt so if any of you are ever casting about for writing ideas, I highly recommend it. And thanks to Summer, Randal and Geoffrey for joining me in this endeavor. I hope you had fun with it, too.

So in case you hadn't gathered from the photo, I want to join The Revolt. Occupy Atlanta is growing and it's time to lend my voice. Especially before it gets cold. Yeah, I'm a weather creampuff. Why do you think I live in the South? The strong labor unions? The politically correct flags? The religious diversity? Heck, I can kill two birds with one hand-lettered and correctly spelled protest sign - I can get involved and make contact with the hippies. Man, I haven't slept around in hung out in a tent city since we had our hemp knickers in a twist about Apartheid.

Yeah, it would be good for me to get out of my head and into the mix. I'd be safer with the threat of pepper spray and cops in need of anger-management classes.

But hey, that's part of my charm!

 Take care, be kind to each other and I'll see you on the ramparts, y'all.

*Thanks, Dot!

30 Day Photography Challenge - Black and White

Something about this appeals to me. The negative space maybe.

I'm thinking about turbulence today. The plane hits a mean pocket of air. The car stumbles over a jagged roadway upheaval. Something comes out of nowhere and jolts your balance. Blindsided. The Surprise! that doesn't come with shouts of happy birthday.

Do you hold on tight, white knuckle grip through it or let your body go slack until you find your balance again?

Tomorrow one last self-portrait and this project will be complete. I'll have proven to myself that I can, in fact,  finish something.

Summer on the rose.
Randal does no harm.
Geoffrey has a happy accident.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Flowers

Catching up!
Summer's paradox at a distance.
Randal put some flowers in his hair.


UPDATED: Geoffrey takes us back to the beginning.

Forty-six is a weird age. Not weird like when you're twelve and itching to be a teenager or you're fifteen and anxious to get your driver's license or when you're between eighteen and twenty-one, the time of being an adult who can get married and fight wars for rich people, but you can't drink alcohol. Legally.

No forty-six, for a woman, at least, is weird because it's the time when you're body is shifting gears from being a potential baby-maker to being a walking exhibit of good and bad choices. It even has its own capitalized name. The Change.

I'm going to go into some personal stuff here so if you're bothered by periods and such, please step away. I'm not in a mood to wrap reality in rainbows and unicorns for anyone. Because I'm 46.

First - this isn't because I just turned 46 although knowing that I'm closer to being fifty than I could have every imagined I'd be, has been a bit of a shock. The reality is that I could have written this post when I was 45 and it will likely be relevant when I'm 47, too.

My body is definitely changing so what do I do? Well, I ask my husband stupid questions like "We didn't have some kind of sperm accident that I've forgotten, did we?" 

To which he rolls his eyes and utters a denial and a number that makes it abundantly clear that he's keeping track of how many times we've had sex in the last month. 

So where's my period?

The first time this happened, I freaked out. Like when I had sex with my boyfriend in the back of his Chevelle and we counted on his good lord and the pull out method. My period would be late and I'd go into a self-flagellating panic. I was a smart girl with a promising life ahead of me, why on earth would I let an unsheathed penis within six feet of my vagina?

Every time I went to the toilet, I closed my eyes and hoped for the little telltale signs of a bit of pink on the tissue. Please oh please, I prayed to no one in particular, let my uterus shed its lining!

And here I am again. Without my trusty IUD. With pretty much the same careless contraceptive methods that were the hallmark of my teens. And I'm wondering if I'm going to end up with an Oopsy Daisy baby. The horror. I'm over the parenting thing. If I could give Sophie an express ticket to eighteen? In a heartbeat. Selfish? Oh yeah. Think I care? Let's just say if I had baby advice to offer it's this - if you want more than one, do it bam, bam, bam! Four or five years between three kids means I've been at this for twenty-one years and I'm in for the hard stuff for another five with no time off for good behavior.

I love them. Of course, I love them, but I'm ready to be living the life in those Toyota commercials where the empty nesters go horseback riding and dancing and, by god, I won't be satisfied until I've held hands with my love while we sit side by side in matching claw-footed bathtubs admiring the sunset.

So what does this have to do with flowers? Well, I'll tell ya. It might be a stretch, but I'll do my best.

Just keep repeating to yourself "The sweet flower of youth" and you'll get the idea.

Some of you know what Pinterest is, but if you don't here's a link. Right click it and open it in a new tab or window so you can stay here and read my really important words. Go on, I'll give you a sec to get the gist.

Back? Good. So here's the thing - some of Chloe's friends and I follow each other on Pinterest and it's delightful because they are lovely young women with so much promise and talent. I adore them. But there's a dark side to this and here it is: Pinterest is my daily reminder that not only is my flower fading, but that there will come a point when they - those beautiful, intelligent young women - will burst forth with their own flowers of fertility and there's no holding it back. Biology won't let us no matter how many bargains we offer. Where we leave off, they'll begin and so it goes, Kurt.

The itch to mate is taking them by their smooth-skinned hands and leading them toward marriage and motherhood. They're pinning ideas for how their houses will look, wedding ideas, wedding reception ideas, and yes, baby ideas. Sigh.

I love it that they can use technology to visually dream, but sigh. And as an aside, boy am I glad that this kind of thing didn't exist when I was twenty and torturing my own mother with how my life would be so damned superior to the lame choices she'd made. Holy white sofas in high rise apartments, she'd be laughing maniacally and sending me links to all kinds of big ideas that never materialized.

I mentioned this to the Voice of Reason who once again rolled his eyes and reminded me that I was twenty-two when we married and furthermore, by the ripe old age of twenty-five was so desperately in the clutches of the biological need to procreate that I bit a hole in a used condom and inserted into my vagina.

How annoying of him to use my own history to illustrate a point.

So what is it that bothers me about seeing Chloe's friends pinning their dreams on marriage and babies and House Beautiful?

All of it. None of it. It's a reminder of things done, undone and not done. It's my friend who divorced at forty-one and shared with me that she'd heard envy expressed by so many women our age. It's the middle-aged lament is this all there is? It's the grinding sameness of every day because I'm feeling trapped and need someone else to blame because that silver-haired chick in the mirror is busy craving a return of her eighteen year old face unlined by time, stress and sun. It's the emotional adolescence of wanting what I want when I want it, consequences be damned. To blithely ignore the needs of others for a change, to eradicate the contractions can't and won't and shouldn't from my vocabulary so I can finally reach that much rumored potential.

And of course, on my worst days, I want my youth back but with the caveat that I get to take today's knowledge with me.

Because, let's face it, age does give us the gift of experience. I would only want to go if I knew that I could go confident that most of what people say isn't very well thought-through so I shouldn't take it personally. That not everyone is going to like me and that's okay. That it's fine to wear that skirt, to toss out those shoes, to leave the dishes in the sink, to plant my ass in a chair and read a book, to phone that friend, to take that trip, to leave the sadness for another day, to write with abandon, to tell that boss no, to laugh off that joker, to skip the fries and have the milkshake, to say yes to this dress, but not that one.

This isn't about regret. This is about learning. This is about looking at where I am now and figuring out what comes next because, well, fifty is kind of what I see as my personal halfway mark. And there's still so much to do, you know?

But first there are some pressing issues to consider. Do I buy a case of pregnancy tests just to be safe? What I don't use, I could hand out at high schools that teach abstinence only. I won't tempt the fates by wearing light colored pants, but how am I supposed to go on without blaming my chocolate cravings on hormones? That has been part of my personal narrative for so long, it will be like learning a new language.

Maybe I've won the hormonal lottery. My periods were always light and painless. I got pregnant easily. My pregnancies were fairly uneventful if you overlook a little bed rest here or there which was probably my body telling me to lay off the cleaning jags anyway. Is it possible that my uterus just closed for business and didn't leave a forwarding address? I've had one or two things that felt like hot flashes, but otherwise The Change for me has been a breeze. Goodness me, I can't believe I typed all that. I might as well have just done this:

Dear Trouble, come and get me.

What kind of cycles have you guessing?

30 Day Photography Challenge - From a Distance

I have this friend who says, and rightly so, that Georgia is the Wild West of planning and zoning.

I wish I could distance myself from this, but I can't. It's everywhere begging for the symbolism of it to be recognized, named, called what it is. A crying shame? Criminal? The likely conclusion? The slow motion accident?

Spaces never leased.

Vultures and Herons gossip in the dry retention pond.

What symbolism?

It's their's now.

In or out?

Unfinished business.

Getting out while the gettin's good?

128 empty lots since 2008 or 2009

In my own neighborhood.

Foreclosed.

When we moved here in April of 2009, the guy who lived here rode his lawnmower like a stallion, a sense of lawn-related pride making his ruddy skin glow in the the afternoon sun.

Now it belongs to the bank. The bank has chosen to let Nature be the caretaker.

Yeah, I could use some distance from this. But with the Congressional shenanigans doing nothing to help the 99% of us not sitting on piles of growing money, the corporate media's complicity and the ability of those in the high offices looking down upon Zucotti Park to descend in their marble elevators to waiting cars that purr, I mean purr, when you turn the key in the ignition, and drive away having zero contact with the little people,  the impact we've felt so far will be fondly remembered as a feather light touch in days to come.

While those of us who continue to play by the rules because we're bereft of options and imagination and the gas and bail money to join The Revolution are wading into the muddy waters with stones in our pockets, those who made this mess and those who helped and those who refuse to acknowledge it and those who refuse to force some accountability on them all move further and further away into the distance.

Randal and his spooky noochies which aren't nearly as depressing.

UPDATED: Geoffrey takes us on a trip.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Close Up

Some things require a closer look.

As long as we're not talking about my fine lines and wrinkles, I'm cool with that.

Thank you for indulging me while I'm more or less phoning it in.
I'm taking the liberty of my birthday to play and it has been wonderful. Tomorrow we'll take a step back, but for now....

Geoffrey goes super macro!


Randal runs on, Mr. DeMille.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Pink

I see you edited my sign.
Mama, it was embarrassing.
Hey, instead of the what I was originally going to put - the god damned door - which, I understand, turns children to dust or something - I chose my next favorite word. Besides, it got your attention, didn't it?
Mama, we cannot have a sign on the laundry room door that says keep this fucking door shut.
I don't see why not. It's my house.
I told you! It's embarrassing!
I'll tell you what's embarrassing - having your friends in a house where they're likely to be bitten by fleas.
They don't get bit! They're gingers. Nothing bites them. Ask them. They'll tell you.
Just keep the door closed. There's clean laundry in there to carry upstairs and I don't want the damn cats on it.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Today, the last day of 45, I'll spend fighting fleas. We've bombed until our eyebrows began falling out, bathed the cats until they're traumatized and we're bloody, I've become genetically fused to the vacuum cleaner and still, I'm walking around in white socks picking up the little monsters and dunking them in glasses of water. And let me tell ya, there's nothing quite so sexy as a chubby chick in short shorts, a yoga top and knee high gym socks. I'm just waiting for TLC to show up with their cameras, y'all.

We've washed all the bedding twice, opened the house for a decent airing and prayed (even though it goes against our nature) for a jolly good cold snap. Freezing would be nice. I'd sit naked in twenty degree weather with my hair wet and twisted into a unicorn horn of flea shampoo if I thought it would rid us of these nasty little buggers.

I'm contemplating setting aside my convictions about no kill shelters and loading the cats into the Corolla and taking them to the Humane Society. Here, kitty, kitty, wanna go for a ride with Mommy?
But they'll put them to sleep!
Are you the one vacuuming eight hours a day?
Yeah, I thought so.

I woke up screaming from a nightmare. Visions of that magnified flea used in commercials danced before me and I clawed at an itch on my leg.

I think we should just move and not take anything.
Okay, now you're being unreasonable. His eyes didn't leave his computer screen.

Fine. Unreasonable I'll be.

For my birthday, I'd like a few thousand dollars, a passport bearing a new identity, a short stay in a posh institution and possibly a lobotomy if it will also do away with my hellacious sweet tooth once and for all.

Or some cough drops from Randal.


Geoffrey goes pink in a way I can truly appreciate.

UPDATED: Summer puts us on hold with cake!

*********

Here's the good news - I finished the revisions on my novel. I know I've teased some of you with the prospect of being beta readers, but I'm a little afraid that if I keep working on it, I'll never take the next step. So I'm going to go ahead and start querying agents while some of you read it for me.

Following is the first draft of my query so you can determine whether or not you want to read the dang thing. I assure you, it's not going to be everyone's glass of sweet tea. If, after reading this synopsis, you want to read the draft, please let me know. Thank you, youse guys.

Julie Rhodes is typical of her time – a wife, a mother, a woman trying to juggle her family’s needs, her own desires, her faltering marriage, her status as one of the many unemployed Americans looking for work, and the speed at which everything moves in 2010. She knows she’s losing the battle and wishes for something different.

When she wakes up in 1944 England, Julie realizes she should have been more specific.

Sure that she's dreaming because her son has been joking that he's General George S. Patton reincarnated,  Julie quickly learns that her place in history has been reset and she's gotten the do over she wished for. In exchange, she's lost her family, friends and the internet.

A 73k word mainstream novel, History We Don’t Know tells the story of how Julie adjusts to life in wartime England while trying to find a way back home. Told from several points of view, the story also describes how Julie's family adjusts to life without her and how our perceptions of time and love can change in an instant.

********

Gee, really? A fed up woman dreaming of something different? Full circle!

What's eating you?

30 Day Photography Challenge - Animal

They roar when you open their mouths for a cookie.

UPDATED: Summer gives us a sparkly two-fer!

Geoffrey on the mend. And with animals galore.

Randal and those puppy eyes.

I couldn't bring myself to show you another photo of the cats and I'm not about to take a snap of the poor smooshed fox on the side of the road into town, so I thought I'd go with something a little less obvious. Or maybe not.

Spot the animal.

This is one of those moments where I can't think of a single nice thing to say so I'm going to do what my mom always advised.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Sunflare

This could have been the day I finally went meh, I'm over this project because I didn't feel like aiming my camera at the sky.

I'm otherwise occupied and distracted and there's this to watch and this rabbithole to tumble into and a request that I listen to something that is going to make me sigh with longing, and those horrible fleas are nipping at my feet so that I have to sit all tucked up on my chair until my feet fall asleep and the light breeze on a sunny day and Betty's eggs and good strong, black coffee and the ongoing manuscript edits and brain numbing job search and the new webcam and the tweeting of birds without hashtags and a bag of Halloween candy that will never hear its first Trick or Treat.

I owe you a photo, don't I?

Randal reminds us of what's coming. And then there's this.

UPDATED: Summer finds the meaning.


What's got your attention? What are you humming when you stare at the sun?

Mine.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Not We Are The World

When he was little, he would lay his chubby, baby-soft hands on my cheeks and say "I look like Mama" in his gravely voice. When he was about two, I put a real baseball into his outstretched hand and in return he gave me a black eye with it. Now I watch his hands steer the wheel of the car with ease. Almost a man. I see him absentmindedly pet a cat who's taken up residence on his lap as he watches Top Gear and get a glimpse of how tenderly he might treat his own child some day.

May that day be far far off. I'm just putting that out there because there's a condom on his dresser in plain sight. Better that he has one, I tell myself. It does, however, beg the question - should I ask him if he needs it every time he leaves the house? A recent search of old Ann Landers' columns holds no clues. Useless, Ann.

The house is loud when they're around. There's no mistaking it when they offer commentary for everything on the television. No one is safe from their razor sharp tongues. Not Anthony Bourdain, not arod or is it A Rod? Whatever.  If they think you're doing something wrong - and there's lots of wrong being done in this world - they're going to point and laugh and holla. With the volume cranked up to eleven.

Guys, let me take some photos of your hands.
Not like that! That's too We Are the World!
What's the statement you're trying to make, Mom?
Do a handshake.
A white guy handshake or a black guy handshake?
There's a difference?
Pay no attention to her, Torezz. She doesn't know what she's talking about.
You can't do a black guy handshake right.
Do this. No this. This. Wait. Let's do this.
Are those gang symbols?
Maybe.
Um....
We won't throw gang symbols on your blog. Jeez.

And when it was done, they took their show into the kitchen and used those hands to grate potatoes to make themselves hash browns to go with their frozen waffles and half a gallon of syrup.

UPDATED!


Randal does a cover up.
Geoffrey on what makes us - us.

UPDATED ENCORE
Summer and the little artist.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Faceless Self Portrait

If you look really closely, you'll see a binder clipped stack of papers under the table. No, that's not the President's job bill, it's the manuscript in its many iterations.

I'm on a self-imposed deadline to get this work in progress finished. October 11. It's going to be finished come hell or high levels of anxiety. Okay, so the high levels of anxiety are a given.

In the meantime, I'm falling in and out of love, fighting fleas that don't play bass, hanging laundry on the line and scheming to be part of Occupy Wall Street. I might have to settle for Occupy Stonebrook Drive. Fuck. Because I'd rather drive to Chicago or NYC than deal with the lunacy of Atlanta traffic, that's why.

What have you got up your sleeve?

Randal gives me nightmares.

UPDATED:  Geoffrey is defined like this.  

UPDATED MORE! Summer and the amazing ponyholder!

30 Day Photography Challenge - Bokeh?

I leaned into the side by side Hotpoint and aimed the blow dryer at the thick layer of frost and ice coating the back of the freezer and thought of my mother. A memory of her standing in front the avocado green fridge aiming the vintage light blue metal blow dryer at the freezer and muttering about being electrocuted.

I've electrocuted myself a number of times so that part of the adventure isn't as glamorous as it once was. As an aside, please note that if you ever see an article written by me about how to rewire lamps, understand it's a humor piece.

While I watched the water melt and trickle down the freezer's sides, I remembered how we used to take cups and scrape the ice from the inside of the freezer to eat like Freon flavored snow cones because we couldn't  figure out how to turn Kool Aid into syrup. Not for a lack of trying, mind you, but the failed attempts always ended with ice scrapings melting into red or purple puddles in the bottom of our cups.

You could probably draw some conclusions about why I am the way I am based on the knowledge that I used to eat ice scrapings from the freezer.

Well, now that I would know exactly how to make snow cone flavoring (simple syrup + Kool Aid powder), I'm past the age where I'd find joy in scraping the frost from the freezer and spooning it into my mouth. (Please believe this!)

Timing is everything.

Why am I prattling on about this? I was going through an exercise hoping that I'd remember what I was thinking about writing as I defrosted the freezer. I thought if I put myself back in that place, I might remember what I wanted to write, but was too busy not electrocuting myself to stop and write down before it got crowded out.

And guess what? It worked!

Bokeh means blurry in the photography patois and so I give you this:

If you enlarge the photo (taken on my drive back from visiting Chloe), you'll see the reflection of Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I. I'm a ridiculously slow reader, taking weeks to finish a book. As such, I've been schlepping poor Betty and her eggs around for a couple of weeks. In case you didn't guess, I take a book with me wherever I go. You never know when you're going to need one. They're useful props for social situations allowing one to to not engage with others, for self entertainment, for swatting aggressive bees, and just in case one ever needs to MacGuyver oneself out of a dire situation. Worst case scenario, you have something to read until the factory you're locked in implodes in a planned demolition.

One of the things I've been doing to keep from losing my damn mind during this long work drought is to try to look at things from different perspectives. One way I've done this is by writing my novel from different points of view. Another thing I've found useful is to take a step back and shift the focus of how I internally narrate what's going on. For example, I wasn't laid off and have been unable to find work, but instead, so the new narrative goes, I'm transitioning careers from la di da association executive to being a published writer. Throw in a long stint as a passive aggressive hausfrau and you pretty much have the picture blurry though it may be.

And as long as I can remind myself that nothing I do is as difficult as what Betty MacDonald had to do on that chicken ranch, I know I'm going to be all right.

At Randal's place, you get the blame.


I love what Summer did with Bokeh.

UPDATED:  Geoffrey goes in another direction.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Orange

It's the wide bottom of candy corn. The part I eat first as I dissect each piece - bottom, middle, tiny white top - in an attempt to make the sweet moment last. To toss a handful into my mouth would be an effrontery to the season. Treats such as this are to be savored, relished, sugar melting on your tongue. Then there are the games. One piece, white side down, carefully centered between upper lip and teeth. He calls it egg tooth. Some of us prefer two transforming us into vampires, fangs courtesy of Brach's.

I went looking for the photo of him doing egg tooth, but couldn't find it. I did find this and he's wearing orange.

Now that boy is taller than both of us.

It's the color of my brother's striped shirt when he was a little kid. The Bengals football helmet he wore as he rode his Big Wheel in a hail storm a few hours before tornadoes shimmied across the hills, dangerous sisters they were.

It's the color of the plastic whale we played with in the bathtub.

It's marigolds and citrus stuck with rock and roll earrings. It's my high school boyfriend's Trans Am and the Harvest Moon hung over the Ohio. It rhymes with nothing, but it sounds like basketballs bouncing on the wooden gym floor. It's autumn leaves and packages of Reeses', crepe paper streamers twined with black. It's tigerlillies, zinnias and carrots yanked from the ground. It's the Monarch fluttering by. It's the color of a sunset. It's Blogger and Dunkin Donuts and seasonal frosting on your cupcake. Concentrate it and it becomes focus and energy.


It's sectioned and quartered, squeezed and peeled. It's pies and breads, spreads and cookies. It's spiced and carved and Jack o'Lantered with a candle flickering inside. A beacon.

Fiddlesticks. I just made myself hungry.

Geoffrey goes black and white about orange. Randal is radioactive and Poe dark. Alas.

UPDATED: Summer and the effects of orange.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Shoes

I would love to tell you that I mince around the house in beautiful, soft leather pumps while I scoop the litter boxes and make the coffee. That I mince when I'm not tottering around the grocery store feeling up the melons while my feet are shod in the most awesome four inch heeled black ankle boots ever made by human hands. And I mince and totter when I'm not throwing my come fuck me heels over MathMan's shoulders.

Except that would be one big fat lie. Case in point:

And what's worse - I have small feet. Size five or five and a half. That size is hard to find in the women's shoes section so I often resort to shopping in the kids section. You'd never guess, right?

Well, I don't know if you know this, but it's difficult to find stripper shoes in the kids' section. Sperry can't be convinced to add five inch acrylic heels to any of their fashions no matter how many pleas I send them.

So it's pretty much canvas for me. But you can rest assured, the sensible shoes conceal some randy nail colors. Flip flops excepted, of course.

But even shoes need a break so I mostly go barefoot until I can't. And then I put on slippers. And I'm not showing you my slippers. Those feathers and sequins are my little secret.

I'm out of here for today. It's family weekend at Brenau and I'm going to go hang with my Chloe who I miss more than I realized.

Don't forget to visit Geoffrey, Randal and Summer, y'all. I'm going to take tomorrow off and pick up on Monday with the color orange. Which rhymes with -------------

xoxoxo

Lisa

What are your favorite pair of shoes?

30 Day Photography Challenge - Technology

UPDATED: Summer exposes the Mirror of Erised.

There's no question that I am a fan.

I love it that I can Skype with my friend in France or that we can join in the family holidays even when they're in Chicago and we're in Georgia.

I love that I can watch live music remotely.

It's wonderful that people who would have died not so long ago can now live because of science and technology.

An aside - don't you love it when people use technology to proclaim a disdain for science? Silly humans.

I'm glad that when a hurricane or a tornado or a blizzard is heading our way, we can now prepare for it.

I am still a little amazed that I can walk around with a roomful of milk crates jammed full with record albums and audio books in my pocket.

It's pretty damn cool that my kids can watch movies and TV shows and read books on these little devices they hold in their hands.

I like that when I talk to my mother, I share with her the Rising Sun gossip and goings on because I'm on Facebook and she's not.

I will never regret the worlds I've tapped into because of this infernal typing machine. (Love you guys!)

I love it that when my kids need me that they can reach me. And I'm pleased that they've done a good job of figuring out when it's really important to call. Or text. They text when they don't want a lecture.

I don't exactly love it that MathMan can text me every time he pees, but it still makes me laugh.

The daily essentials.

A gratuitously edited shot.

My old friend. I miss you. And all the content that died with you.

I love that I can take a million photos and keep the best.

But all this comes at a price doesn't it?

Technology is changing us.

And I'm not even talking about the ridiculous bitching that goes on when Facebook changes something or that people tweet about what they're eating (me included!) or reality television or spammers who fill our inboxes with penis enlargement emails or that haters can more easily spread their hate and scammers can expand their reach or that I'm struggling to keep up - Google+, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Blogger, Wordpress, Klout, iTunes, Amazon, Goodreads, Pinterest, and who knows what else I'm forgetting or that when something doesn't work right, people (read: me) lose their shit in the most appalling displays of crybaby hysterics or that we're seriously fucking up the environment and all this technology won't be able to save us from ourselves.

No, I'm talking about the fact that this technology creep, this influx of stuff is turning me into a charger hoarder.

Summer at Phoenix Berries is someone I know only through blogging, but over the years, I feel like I've gotten to know this incredibly intelligent, talented, and spiritual young woman. One of the beautiful things she shares with her readers is her children. I've watched Summer's little family grow from three to four and it's been a delight to see how she's raising her young children in this changing world. Yesterday she told the story of how Pip got his name.

Randal gets very artsy and angers his muse.

Geoffrey reaches out and touches somebody.

Love/hate technology? Let us count the ways in comments.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Long Exposure

"Hey, when you take your shirts down from the closet, can you grab the hanger, too? Toss it on the bed or put it in the hamper. That way I don't have to go hunting hangers when I'm in the basement doing laundry." She turned and looked at him. His eyes were on his computer screen and he didn't reply.

"Honey?"

He looked in her direction.

"Did you hear me?" She wiggled the hanger in her hand interrupting the heavy air between them.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Hangers in the hamper. Okay."

"Thanks."

*****************

Nothing changed in that regard. The hangers remained askew from where he'd yanked the shirt down in his rush to get out of the house. She'd sigh that annoying martyred sigh, reach up and pluck the hanger from its spot, often having to untangle it from its neighbors.

On her bad days, those hangers are the symbol of one more thing she does for people who could do such things for themselves. She knows this because there was once a time when she, too, rushed out the door to get on with her day and the hangers made their way to the laundry room without her morning hike around the house.

On her good days, she'd remember that those hangers never made it to the laundry room unless she reminded him and the children to bring them down. Or, as was often the case, she spent her evenings after work and weekends going from room to room retrieving them and resenting the fact that despite of her job and long commute, she bore most of the domestic duties, as well.

Also on her good days, she'd remind herself that he was busy. Always working. Away from the house and at home. She'd recently joked (okay it wasn't so much a joke) that with the hours he put in planning and grading and answering emails and all the other things a teacher does, his hourly wage was probably hovering near minimum wage.

All their married lives they'd struggled for balance between them - who was giving enough, who was giving too much, who wasn't paying attention, who was using work as an escape, who was looking out instead of in. These last two years had been a real test of their ability to adjust the scales.

So what was it about the hangers that lit the pilot of her ire?

********************

"Where's the hanger for my jacket?"

One simple sentence. A legitimate question asked by a reasonable man who just wanted to hang up his hoodie now that the day was warming. At other points in their twenty-three year marriage, she would have been thrilled that he even thought to hang it up.

"I must have taken it when I collected them to take downstairs. I'm sorry."

He stood holding his jacket and frowning. "I just wanted to hang this up."

"I'm sorry. Put it on the chair and I'll bring up a hanger in a little while." Unbelievable. He was pissed at her for keeping the wheels of domestic order in forward motion? Did he think all this shit got done by magic? She'd asked him more than once (and yes, that matters when you're keeping score) to deal with those fucking hangers at the time he took his shirts out of the closet and he'd either forgotten or refused (which would not be unlike him to spite her in a little way like that!) and now he was bitching about not having a hanger.

He repeated his grievance. "You know, I just want one hanger."

"I'm sorry. I said I'd take care of it!"

These words got said over and over, louder and louder until she left the room, slamming the door behind her.

********************

Monday morning came and everyone with somewhere to go raced out the door or, in the case of some of them, dragged themselves out. She wandered the house, picking up things that had been discarded without a thought as to where they belonged, making beds, tidying this and that. The closet door stood open and there hung an empty hanger slightly askew. She reached up to take it then stopped.

UPDATED: Geoffrey has a different and essential perspective.
Randal is not Armin Tanzarian, but you might remember him from such blockbuster films as Librarians Go Wild.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Silhouette

First things first: A lot of you will relate to Summer and her 13 things.  Randal's 13 things better not topple over on him or his eye.

UPDATED: Geoffrey is rescued by a cat.

UPDATED Encore: We could call Summer Hazel.

Today I'm supposed to give you a silhouette so I walked around the house camera in hand and determined not to point the dang thing at myself again.

I dicked around with a few things, but it felt pointless because the image stuck in my head when I think silhouette is this one that graces The Storialist's Facebook page.

Now this is what I think about when I think silhouette. Delicate, a beautiful cameo. And if you haven't read Hannah's poetry, you're in for a treat.

************************

There's an unemployment diary post at my other blog. I'm feeling a bit raw and ready to nutpunch someone.

30 Day Photography Challenge - Eyes

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then what do you suppose these eyes are saying?

Randal turns up the pretty on Cleveland.

UPDATED: Geoffrey is being watched.

30 Day Photography Challenge - 13 Things

First I took a photo of myself with thirteen books that meant something to me.

Okay now that I got that out of the way, here's one where you can actually see the books and not simply the narcissist with the camera and a mad penchant for photo editing.

1. Steven King's On Writing given to me by Lola Sharp.

2. The 3 a.m. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley, a gift from Kirie.

3. Trouble De Ville by Steve Denton who has also published the graphic novel Hip Deep Mountain High.

4. Do Not Disturb - Hotel Sex Stories, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. My friend Lillian Ann Slugocki has a deliciously erotic story included.

5. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. One of my favorite stories ever.

6. The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott. Writer's crush does not even begin to describe it.

7. Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees. This book and Betsy's blog opened up a whole new world of friends to me and I'm forever grateful.

8. The Pat Hobby Stories by F.Scott Fitzgerald. I can still see myself reading these as I munched a turkey on rye with lettuce, tomato and mayo in the cafeteria of the Rotary International building in Evanston, Illinois. Back then it never would have occurred to me that I would take an active interest in the writing of screenplays and scripts.

9. Elizabeth Berg's Say When. It's the first of Berg's books I read. I have quite the collection now. 

10. The Art of Table Dancing by DC Stanfa. Pee your pants funny. DC does things I only wish I had the gonads to do.

11. The Preacher's Bride by Jody Hedlund. As a sore-headed agnostic, I am clearly not the target market for this book, but I was lucky enough to win this from Jody's blog and by page three, was a fan. Between topnotch research and wonderful prose, Jody writes the kind of historical fiction that has broad appeal.

12. The New Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie. It's full of detail about the novels and the movies. And Christie's relationship with her characters.

13. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I love Roth's novels. This one knocked my sandals off.

And then I had an email exchange with Randal who gave me an idea. He asked if I'd be photographed with thirteen bags of kitty litter? While that would have mass appeal, I'm sure, I don't have thirteen bags of litter hanging around. (I wish!) I thought about other items I could photograph myself with, but ended up dismissing them mostly because I didn't have 13 of this or that.

1. Thirteen cats. (We're six short and I intend to keep it that way.)
2. Thirteen sex toys. (Where would I hide that many?)
3. Thirteen clean towels. (It is to dream.)
4. Thirteen whistles. (I wish I had thirteen whistles!)
5. Thirteen vintage cars. (Alas I am not Jay Leno.)
6. Thirteen jars of olives. (Not even on my best stockpiling trips did I snag that many jars of olives!)
7. A baker's dozen of donuts. (Come one, like they'd survive past the first photo intact?)

Having hit all those brick walls, I went with this which I fondly call The Writer's Life. The sound I was making was like a cross between the yowling the cats make when I don't feed them fast enough and Fran Drescher's laugh.

Geoffrey makes glorious sounds. Please go and tell him that his butt looks fine.
Summer offers swoon worthy sunsets. SWOONWORTHY.