The Court Jester. “Those who try to tangle with my derring-do, wind up at the angle that herring do. They hold their heads like very dead herring do.” I love that movie. PBS Saturday and Sunday afternoons, spent watching black and white movies. The Court Jester. Ivanhoe. And we knew when pledge week was on, […]

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O Mi-Mi Tee! We put up our little Christmas tree on Friday. I love Target. In a world of ritzy glass tree ornaments, they had shiny, tinted, plastic snowflakes and ball ornaments on sale, so we could decorate the tree together and leave it where Ray could touch it and not get yelled at (too

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Ugh. Don’t take a nap just before sunset, no matter how full and lazy you are. You’ll be so disoriented when you wake up. Bleah. And your mouth tastes funny. I know a good cure for nap-overs, though. Chocolate. You don’t know nap-overs? Rachael and I know nap-overs. There are times when we wake up

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Aha! Not a major epiphany. Not enlightenment. But a victory! Making dense cheesecase, you don’t really need a full crust to hold everything together–you just need some way of easing the thing out of the pan. So: Brush the pan with melted butter. Scatter graham cracker crumbs on the butter, about 3-4 Tbs. or so,

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Book Reviews. Summer of the Dragon, Elizabeth Peters, Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett Elizabeth Peters is a mystery writer. She writes “perfect” novels–beginning, middle, end, all items neatly resolved at the end of the last page. The world extends just as far as the front and back covers. So, as far as it went, Summer of

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Book. The first draft of The Gods of Grey Hill is done. Done! Done! I tell you, Done! Now I have 67 pages to type in 🙂 — I feel sad. I went to a coffee shop to drink chai and write the last few pages and I cried on the way home. It’s done.

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Ray Updates. Damn. She’s getting so tall. We have good days and bad days, which seem to follow a correlation with my patience level. What’s the word? Heterodyne? Yeah, that’s the word. We’re definitely already two women living in the same house, which means, yes, that we have to hold hands going to the bathroom

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Thank you. Lee’s mom (in South Dakota) sent me a jar of chokecherry jelly. Thank you. I haven’t opened it yet; I swore to myself I’d finish the open jar of jelly in the fridge (blackberry) before I did. Sure enough, every time I look at it, I think, “I could be having chokecherry jelly

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Working. Almost done with Saturday. Scary. As it turns out, things fit together better than I would have predicted. Do you know how scary that is? The story put itself together out of random items that I didn’t originally include in the plot, but suggested themselves. It’s like watching a movie in someone else’s mind.

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