Visit the kelpforest....

This is a promotion he's doing with Blackberry, but it sounded interesting. Alas, I do not have a Twitter account. I watch a few people but damned if I don't feel like I'm listening to one side of a phone conversation and I can't restrict myself to 140 characters. While I tried his prompts, I forgot about them until after he wrote his Calendar of Tales from the ones others submitted. But they were intriguing, and so I tried...

#keepmoving

Why is January so dangerous? #JanTale
Overpromising and inevitable underdelivering. I try not to promise anything anymore.

What's the strangest thing that ever happened to you in February? #FebTale
Beginning to leak amniotic fluid while on the phone to a friend during an El Nino storm. First child induced the next morning, a month early, spent a week in NICU. Labor is very strange; so are breast pumps.

What Historical figure does March remind you of? #MarTale
Caesar is obvious; and I suppose Wikipedia is cheating. March is in like a lion, symbolized by kites – Benjamin Franklin?

What is your happiest memory of April? #AprTale
Vague memories of Grandma's egg hunts in Penn Park in Whittier, for all the neighborhood kids she babysat.

What is the weirdest gift you've ever been given in May? #MayTale
The sight of my soon-to-be husband being wrapped up like a burrito in a medieval Scottish kilt, in front of all our guests on our wedding day. Weird but wonderful.

Next question: where would you spend a perfect June? (reply with #JunTale.)
Warm but not hot, and no bugs. No weddings, either. Somewhere to snorkel with pretty fishies – My daughter's namesake town on Catalina Island would be wonderful, and still close to home. I've never been there with my family.

What is the most unusual thing you have ever seen in July? (I'm tracking these with #JulTale)
King-of-the-salmon coming up with trawl-nets full of hake, back when I was a fisheries observer on a Polish factory ship. And drunk captains full of cheap Canadian whiskey.

Your next question. If August could speak, what would it say? #AugTale
White seabass opens on the 15th; so does various fishing gear you need to keep track of…Do I have to tell you EVERY YEAR?

Tell me something you lost in September that meant a lot to you. #SeptTale
My brother; I've never felt so betrayed. To completely reverse what you'd said since dad died, and in front of my kids who look up to you?

What mythical creature would you like to meet in October? (&why?) use #OctTale
October is often hot where I live, a preface to winds and fires. Some Asian dragons are said to bring rain – I wonder about making friends with one, who could visit them. I don't think I could actually know, for this too work though; I don't think dragons take kindly to ulterior motives. And know I feel like I should go re-read R.A. McAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon.

What would you burn in November, if you could? #NovTale
Any Christmas decorations, music, lights that show up before Thanksgiving. Excusable arson, except for in July as a joke, or you purposely just left them up all year. Example: Runsmuck used to tell about a friend of his who left up Xmas stuff all year long; he used to rib him thusly:

"So June 25 must be a big celebration day for you, huh?"
"Why?"
"That's when your decorations go from being up late to up early."

Who would you like to see again in December? Don't forget #DecTale
Like anyone else, I wish my mom could spoil her grandkids at Christmas, my best cat Bob to plot Yule tree assassination, my dad, uncle, my grandma, my husband's brother. I'm getting to be an age when that list is becoming more populous than I'd like.

...................

He's written his Tales now (downloadable here), and the next step is art to go with them. Hmmm...I'll have something more to read on the bus, looks like...

Paragraphs vs. Bullet Points: We Speak Now In A Hail Of Bullets

Good stuff to know. Yes, I use them completely wrong here; I quite often combine bullets and paragraphs. Or I'm just so long-winded I find it impossible to cut myself off at a statement per bullet.

One thing to remember for a Powerpoint presentation, though. Even if your talk is about them, DO NOT use little tiny squid as your bullets. From the back of the room, they look like something completely different.

Heh, the little writing meme I posted the other day actually got a review in the Monitor. In which it reveals Margaret Atwood got "You write like Stephen King."

It also provides a link to a spoof of said memage, which may, in my case, be a lot more accurate...



...And I now see why the author didn't post his/her actual results...

While looking for more info on the the July-write-everyday thing, I noticed someone's comment that very few LJ users post quiz results here at LJ anymore; everyone posts them at FaceBook now. While a lot of people hated them, I kind of liked them, especially if people said something why/why not they agreed with the results. I'm a lot more wary of posting them at FB than here because of privacy issues; I had one quiz send its results to everyone (including emails, which it must have scraped) on my list there, which was not really appreciated by some.

Anyhoo - have not seen a quiz on my FL for a very long time. I got the above for this entry and a couple of other everyday entries. I'm not familiar with him but maybe I should go pick up something. Looks very interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

My single piece of fiction got Stephen King, and this got William Gibson. Not that I really believe a computer-generated analysis equates to me having anywhere near their skill (I certainly could never come up with a novel - I can't seem to come up with fictional story ideas to save my life), but it's nice to imagine.

A belated anniversary present - I think I ordered these a day or two before our anniversary, but was too cheap to pay for overnight shipping when regular delivery was free. Levenger had a sale on some really nice pens, so I got one for each of us. With initials even!

"Demonstrator" pens
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
31 May 2009

I did get runsamuck something for the actual day (a Jack Skellington t-shirt from Dismalland) and we did go out to a nice dinner sans kids. So a happy 14th was had, even with tardy gifts. How has it been that long?

Hmm, I'm not really a fanfic writer; and frankly, I'd sort of forgotten about this. I wrote it several years ago and though I meant to, never posted it anywhere; however I recently stumbled across it again in a little used folder on my harddrive, and was nudged to put it up somewhere. bakayaro_onna, I know you beta'ed this, and I think I incorporated most of your suggestions; unfortunately, there were a few I couldn't quite figure out how to do at the time, and in changing computers between then and now, I lost the document you sent me, so you'll have to forgive me. And megthelegend, thanks for inspiring this and letting me run it by you, too, even though you're not a Bebop fan (and hope you don't mind if I quote you).

This is perfectly tame general, although it could be a precursor for something JetxFaye (although I like JetxSpike, I'm afraid my own imagination left to itself is pretty vanilla...)

Distractions - Just a little vignette from a day in the life; Faye is a bit confused....
http://community.livejournal.com/creativebebop/63383.html

or at Fanfic.net:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4285714/1/

(Thanks in advance for reading...)

The Ship

One cold morning I was walking on a dock. Then I saw a ship floating on the sparkling ocean. Its boards seemed to be three feet long. Its hull seem to be so thick. The deck was huge.

When the ship dropped its anchor it made a huge splash. A wave hit the stern of the ship. The stern tipped up. I could see its rudder.

Clouds gathered. Lightning struck the dock. The dock started to break! At the last minute, I jumped onto the ship. The rope broke. We were cut loose from the dock. We were a piece of driftwood on the huige ocean.

The crew was running around with intense speed to get the ship back to land. One of the crew members yelled to another ship.

A crew member accidentally ripped a sail. The captain and crew had to repair the sail. It only took 45 minutes to do this. Then they spotted a dock two miles away. They hoped the patched sail would work. By now the ship had taken a real beating but the ship made it. A few weeks later the ship was struck by lightning. It caught fire and sunk (sic).

Gareth wrote this and had to copy it over for homework last night. Makes me think he'd like to read the Hornblower series someday. This harbor seems to be subject to some strange weather conditions, though.

I found Neil Gaiman's entry today, about his daughter Maddy, quite touching. Because that is exactly why I started this journal.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/12/replacing-something-that-doesnt-exist.html

"... in a few years Maddy will forget that she had ever existed in a flurry of self-referential notes, and I will forget as well. And sometimes this Blog is just a diary, or a reminder. You forget the things you were certain you would always remember, especially the tiny things, and all too often they're the things that matter."

(edit: ...and I'm tickled that I beat Will Wheaton to the punch in quoting this. XD )

I missed the dailyparagraph for few days:

( lightbulbs )

( mexico )

( fossil )

( rats )

( infomercial )

( potato chips )