Beach House in the Burbs

I like Tom Cruise. But he's no Jack Reacher.

2011-12-05T16:49:00.008-05:00

The newest Jack Reacher book, The Affair, by Lee Child, has entered my home. Chris, my husband, grabbed it first and is still enjoying it. But I'm up next. Its arrival got me to thinking about the movie they're making of one of the earlier Reacher books, One Shot, starring Tom Cruise.

Now, I like Tom Cruise just fine. He's maybe a little flaky, but I don't have to live with him. And he's easy to watch in a movie. But Jack Reacher he ain't. Jack Reacher is 6'5" (maybe someone misread that part of the books and thought he was 5'6"). Tom Cruise is 5'7".

Now, I know sometimes men have trouble with exactly what 10" looks like, but it looks like a lot when you're talking height (and other things, too). And Reacher's height is so important that it's mentioned in every book--just in case you forget.

So if not Tom Cruise, then who?

My choice is Josh Holloway, the guy who played Sawyer on Lost. Now, you might say at 6'1 1/2" he's not really 6'5" either, but he comes close. And I can see that having someone really, really tall would make it difficult to film with other much shorter actors. Not to mention he has the dirty-blond hair and ice-blue eyes that Lee Child mentions Reacher having.

Besides, the choice just feels right. Josh is from Georgia, Reacher has ties to the South (as much as an army brat can have ties anywhere). Josh is good to look at. Reacher must be good to look at--he has women falling all over him in every book. Now, Josh might have to bulk up a little, but that's a whole lot easier physical change than growing 10"!

So, who do you think should have been cast as Jack Reacher?

Friends old and new

2011-11-30T13:55:00.001-05:00

As I'm feeling fuzzy-headed with my second bout with the crud this month, I'm thinking about friends who are dealing with much worse: two with cancer, several with no work, one who's slooooowwwwwly recovering from a stroke. And I feel wimpy about my cough (which is on the mend) and sad.

Is the answer fewer friends?

Of course not.

Despite my worries, I find myself smiling when I think about friends. The ones I laugh with--even the ones suffering through cancer and its treatment make me laugh--eat lunch with, make music with, celebrate with, talk books with, travel with, work with and couldn't live without.

So in this season of thankfulness (only a little late, I blame the cough), I am thankful for friends old and new, healthy and sick, near and far who make my days--even those fuzzy with crud and congestion--richer, funnier, more exciting and filled with adventure.

One cat thing after another

2011-11-22T10:46:00.003-05:00

I guess I am turning into the crazy cat lady. Blog posts, Facebook status updates, most conversation seems to involve cats in some way. But I'm hanging on to the fact that I have a dog and a husband to keep me from falling completely into the vat of crazy cat ladyness.

Disclaimer aside, we're struggling with keeping cats off kitchen counters. And I found this article this morning with suggestions for how to do just that. One link led to another, and I found the Cat's House in San Diego.

Inspiration for the next round of home remodeling projects was born. I love the wonky steps, the great colors, the holes leading from one room to another--and the idea that giving the cats somewhere even higher to be than the kitchen counters will perhaps keep them off the cooking and eating surfaces.

Now if I can just get said husband on board with the whole idea!

Cats and Christmas

2011-11-18T10:24:00.006-05:00

With Thanksgiving coming it's time to start thinking about Christmas. I don't DO anything about Christmas until after Thanksgiving, I like to enjoy the holidays in order. But, this year, tree decorating is weighing on my mind.

Below is a reposting of a blog post from a couple of years ago, when we only had three cats, and they conspired to take down the Christmas tree, destroying several ornaments in the process. This year we have five cats.

This cute little sleeping gray one, Maddie, is resting up before her next trip into the kitchen garbage can. The fact that the can has a lid doesn't slow her down. A Christmas tree is gonna be like catnip to her.

Any ideas about how to successfully decorate for Christmas while living with a houseful of cats are welcome indeed.

The Cats Who Killed Christmas

Free to BAD home, three cats who killed our Christmas tree!

The crime:

Close-up of the victim:

The carnage:

Last gasp of pink Christmas lights:

Death of the flamingos-pulling-Santa's-sleigh ornament. My very favorite one, hand painted by my cousin Tina.

The suspects:
Dusty, the ringleader

Stewie, the muscle

Miss Kitty, the brains behind the operation

Approach these felines carefully. They are considered clawed and dangerous!

Seed and Feed Marching Abominable

2011-11-17T14:20:00.007-05:00

Best decision I've made in years was joining this band one year ago this week. The Seed and Feed is an Atlanta-based community band with only two goals: making music and having fun.

After having heard them several times over the years (the band's been around since the '70s) I brushed off my alto sax that I hadn't played in more years than I want to think about and am now making music and having fun with these people every week.

We dress in costumes to perform in parades, at wineries, at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, old folks' homes, neighborhood galas, weddings, bars (we love playing in bars)--really, wherever we get invited (and often paid).

So, for a good time, come out and hear the Seed & Feed. Check our Calendar, it's being updated all the time with new gigs.

This weekend, we'll be heralding Santa's arrival at Atlantic Station Saturday at 6:30 pm. Bring the kids and enjoy the music and fun. That's what we're all about!

A special thank you to our band photographer, Alan Sandercock. He does a great job of capturing our spirit, and took all of the pictures posted here. Check out more of his pictures of the world's greatest band.

Kathryn Tucker Windham, storyteller and inspiration

2011-06-15T09:07:00.005-04:00

According to Kathryn Tucker Windham, yelling "Rabbit, rabbit," at the top of your lungs, before your feet hit the floor on the first morning of every month will guarantee you have good luck all month long. To keep that luck going, eat the pointy end of a piece of pie last. Eating it first is a sure way to bring bad luck.

But to me, the best luck of all came just through knowing Kathryn Tucker Windham, the Alabama storyteller, writer, photographer and inspiration who died this past Sunday at the age of 93.

While she became famous for her ghost stories, including stories about Jeffrey, the ghost who lived with her in her Selma home, the stories I loved best were of her family and friends. I feel like I knew her aunt Bet, the local postmistress who tried to save a tree from demolition with a shotgun and a rocking chair. And her daddy who ran the local bank and told stories to Kathryn. And the carpenter who built the pine box she'll be buried in. She stored her mother's rose point crystal in it in the garage.

I hope that this past June 1, she shouted "Rabbit, rabbit," louder than ever, and is celebrating her good luck with the next great adventure.

One of the funnest days ever was a day spent in Selma in 2008 with Mrs. Windham. I blogged about it then if you'd like to read more: here, here and here.

Murder Goes South a Great Success

2011-02-02T14:49:00.012-05:00

The last Saturday in January was the date of the best ever Murder Goes South mystery conference. This conference distinguishes itself from others with its concentration on mysteries set in the South or written by Southern authors. This year's lineup included featured author Erica Spindler, who spoke at the Friday night dinner; local authors Patricia Sprinkle; and Georgia Adams; and many others.

The conference also offered speakers in other areas of interest to mystery readers and writers, including, Susan Kirkpatrick Smith, an assistant professor, who teaches forensic anthropology. Smith talked about what bones can and can not tell about cause or time of death, and about how the TV shows Bones and CSI get it wrong.

For the first time, the conference offered critiques of 20 pages of a manuscript by a real live New York agent (that last should be said in your best Beverly Hillbillies accent for maximum impact). We welcomed literary agent Janet Reid, from FinePrint Literary Management, who bills herself as the sharkliest agent out there.

Janet also presented one of the breakout sessions, offering information on what agents do and don’t do, what they are looking for and what a rejection letter means. It does NOT mean you and your writing suck!

To have a great time—and learn something about writing while you’re doing it—think about attending MGS next year. The Atlanta Chapter of Sisters in Crime helped sponsor the conference, which is put on by the Friends of the Smyrna Library at the Smyrna Community Center.

Snow Day!

2011-01-10T16:51:00.002-05:00

We're having a snow day here--5+" at our house north of Atlanta. It's been a great day for sitting by the fire, making a snow munchkin (the snow was too dry to make a snow man) and rescuing a cold, homeless mother cat and her kitten (bringing our total of cats to 5). According to sources I have reached Crazy Cat Lady status.

Stay warm, everyone!

The mother cat and kitten we rescued. Looking for name suggestions. We don't know if the kitten is male or female yet. She's (He's) very skittish.

Chris, the Crazy Cat Gentleman

Prissy, who thinks 5 cats is too much!

Snow munchkin

Most surprising things about Ireland

2010-12-05T16:26:00.002-05:00

Guinness is GREAT! Never liked it here in America. But, oh, I am a convert now!

The rocky landscape. Somehow I pictured the Emerald Isle as a rolling, green, golf-course landscape. Not so. It is one big, beautiful rock.

Glad to be from the South

2010-01-07T20:38:00.002-05:00

There are lots of reasons I'm happy to be from the South--my family lives here, my job is here, my husband is here, but one of the biggest reasons is the weather. I'd die in a real winter. I'll take those hot, humid, miserable Georgia summers anytime.

But I love, love, love that I can still get excited about a dusting of snow! It was so beautiful swirling around today. Tomorrow will be awful--the frozen stuff leaving roads slick and icy. But tonight all is peaceful and white.

I know if I lived in the frozen north I'd be sick to death of snow already.

Shut up and go!

2010-01-01T09:23:00.004-05:00

My grandmother, Nana, who passed away in December, left us one final Christmas present this year--one more round of "Shut up and Go!"

Many years ago, Nana told us she'd come up with a new game to play after Christmas dinner. All day we (cousins, aunts, in-laws) bugged her about what this new game was, but she wouldn't tell. She dropped a few non-hints, like, "it doesn't have many rules, except that everybody has to play. Oh, and a couple of others that I'll tell you about later. Now, keep stirring that gravy." Then she'd smile and add, "But you're gonna like it."

When dinner was over, she got a couple of the cousins to follow her to the back of the house while the rest of us gathered in the living room--a small space, that opened to the dining room. We sat on the sofa, on dining room chairs, and in the floor. In a few minutes the cousins came back toting big cardboard boxes. Nana had a basket with folded pieces of paper in it.

The boys set the boxes in the center of the room, then Nana gave us the rest of the rules. "I've been gathering up stuff all year that I thought some of y'all might want," she said. "It's in these boxes. Everybody's going to draw a number." She shook the basket of papers." In order, you get to pick something out of the boxes to take with you. There are only two rules. Everybody has to pick something. And you have to take what you pick out of my house. I don't care if you throw it away when you get home, but it's leaving here."

The game quickly became lots of noisy fun as people traded items and groaned about all the good stuff being gone early. Once we were down to the stuff nobody wanted, the game got its name. Somebody was buried deep in a box, moaning about how there was nothing left that he wanted, when somebody else (And here memories differ. Was it Nana, my dad, my cousin Tim? They all certainly could have said it.) shouted, "Shut up and go!" to the slow-moving picker.

We played Shut up and go! several years at Nana's house. It became almost as anticipated as opening presents Christmas morning. Then we didn't play for a lot of years. Nana moved out of her house. We no longer all got together at Christmas.

But when Nana died this December, we were all together for the first time in ages, Nana's three daughters, their husbands, all us eight grandchildren and most of our spouses, and 14 great-grandchildren. At my aunt's house, the night after Nana's funeral, we introduced another generation to Shut up and go! with the priceless things that Nana had in her assisted-living room for the last several years, things like half-empty bottles of lotion, old scarves and gloves, but really good things, too, like a nativity set that she had loved for years, some jewelry, and the best prize of all, the one we all got to share.

No, not the two dogs on a pink pillow that sing "I Got You, Babe,"--though I'm thrilled to have the toy that gave Nana more laughs than we could have imagined when we gave it to her. No, we all got one more fun night with our whole family, even Nana, who I know I heard hollering "Shut up and go!" as we dragged the game out long into the night.

Nana goes to college

2009-12-14T21:24:00.004-05:00

My Nana died a week ago today. She was 92 years old and lived, at least as far as I knew, a full, wonderful life, though she certainly had her share of hardship. She left behind three daughters (my mother included), eight grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. We were all at the burial and memorial service in Charlotte, NC, this past Friday. Five of the eight grandchildren spoke about Nana at the service. And I learned that she apparently thought we were all as special as I know I was to her. That was the theme that ran through all five of our stories. Here's what I said about her.

I knew from early on that Nana loved me, not in some abstract, send me a card with money in it for Christmas kind of way, but in a concrete way that made me know she wanted me around. She introduced me to her friends. She wanted to know mine. She was a part of my life.

I took all of that for granted until my freshman year of college. I was at Emory, living in a dorm that had been built in the 1920s. It had no air conditioning (in Atlanta, Georgia). I shared a tiny room, just big enough for two desks, two twin beds and two dressers, with a roommate, and a bathroom with 20 other girls on my hall.

One day Nana called. She was planning to drive through Atlanta and wanted to see me. Could she stop and spend the night? I said yes without giving it a second thought. My first realization that this might be unusual behavior--for a grandmother to spend the night in a girls' dorm--came when I mentioned it to my roommate. She didn't seem to mind about Nana spending the night. She just seemed shocked that Nana would want to.

"Does she know where you live?" Nancy asked.

"Does she know where the bathroom is?"

"You're not going to make her sleep on the floor, are you?"

Word spread throughout the dorm of the impending overnight visit by a grandmother. You'd have thought the queen was coming. Was Nana spying on me for my parents? Did I really want her to come? they asked.

And I began to wonder what was wrong with my friends. They couldn't imagine wanting their own grandmothers to spend the night. Or their grandmothers wanting to.

After getting a unanimous verdict that this was weird behavior, I started to wonder what was wrong with us. Should I have outgrown wanting to see my grandmother? Maybe she was checking up on me.

When she showed up, a parade of people from the hall trooped through the room to get a look at her, like she was some strange species from another planet. She was nice and funny and agreed that none of her grandmother friends had spent the night in their granddaughters' dorm rooms, before smiling and saying, "Weren't they missing out?"

As I lay awake that night on the hard linoleum floor, I agreed with Nana. Her friends and mine were missing out, not just on a one night stand that would make a good story for years to come, but also on the kind of relationship that can have fun together, even in a hot, crowded dorm room.

A photo from my last visit with Nana, May 2009.

The cats who killed Christmas

2009-12-06T18:03:00.004-05:00

Free to BAD home, three cats who killed our Christmas tree!

The crime:

Close-up of the victim:

The carnage:

Last gasp of pink Christmas lights:

Death of the flamingos-pulling-Santa's-sleigh ornament. My very favorite one, hand painted by my cousin Tina.

The suspects:
Dusty, the ringleader

Stewie, the muscle

Miss Kitty, the brains behind the operation

Approach these felines carefully. They are considered clawed and dangerous!

Cabinet door disaster

2009-11-03T07:53:00.005-05:00

My plan had been to enter the story of this remodeling disaster in a contest, but I missed the deadline. So, I’ll just post it here. This is a story about our old house, so it happened more years ago than I want to think about.

Before I married Chris I had never held a paintbrush and barely knew which was the business end of a screwdriver.

But Chris was a remodeling contractor and out of economic necessity, I became his assistant. It turns out that one of the things I’m good at is painting—and I like it. I slip into a sort of mindless, meditative state, while I’m working. And then I get to see big changes in a hurry—painting satisfies the contemplative side of me and the short-attention span side as well.

Little did I know how important my new-found painting skills would be. We bought a house with a kitchen with lots of dark brown cabinets. We avoided the kitchen at night because the dark cabinets soaked up all attempts at lighting the room, and we stumbled around nearly blind no matter how many fixtures we turned on.

Those are Chris's legs on the ladder between the island and the upper cabinets.

After knocking around in the dark for several months, we removed all the cabinet doors and drawers and took them to the basement, where I set to work sanding and prepping them for painting.

Me sanding cabinet doors--before disaster struck!

I sanded at least a million drawer fronts and doors, then laid them on sawhorses to prime and paint. After painting a batch, I’d hang them with a screw (I had learned how to use a screwdriver by this time) and wire to another wire stretched across the basement to dry.

This project took several days, with Chris working upstairs on other things all the while. I had just put the final coat of glossy white paint on the last set of doors and had decided to leave them on the sawhorses to dry rather than hang them up.

As I surveyed my work, making sure I hadn’t missed any spots, rain began to pour on my head and on the freshly painted doors—an unusual occurrence because I was in the basement. I wasn’t so worried about myself, I needed a shower after all. But the paint on the doors wasn’t dry, and I saw my hours of work rippling and bunching up as the water hit it. I’d have to start all over with sanding, priming, and painting.

I screamed up through the floor at Chris. “Turn the water off. Turn the water off. It’s ruining my doors.”

But there was no answer from the kitchen, which was right above my head. By the time I ran upstairs, Chris was headed out the front door to the water meter to turn the water off. He had taken the kitchen sink supply lines loose in order to replace them, then gone to the store to buy new ones. When he got back, he went to do some work in the bathroom and turned the water back on to test that work without finishing up in the kitchen. Because we had no floor covering in the kitchen, the water poured through the cracks between the pieces of subflooring and straight down on my cabinet doors.

While I did all of the necessary repainting, Chris re-did all of the sanding—a job I hate.

Eventually, the cabinets and the rest of the kitchen came out great—nice and bright.

And, yes, after living through the winter with the snow-like look, we scraped the paint off the upper window panes.

Love Houseblogs

2009-10-26T08:37:00.005-04:00

Chris and I are home remodelers from way back. We've lived in three works-in-progress (still do) and fixed up and sold several other houses, back when the market would let you do that.

When we're not actually in the throes of some remodeling project, we read about other projects, we look at magazines for inspiration--we wouldn't want to run out of things to do to our house, after all--and we visit Web sites, sometimes for inspiration and sometimes to remind ourselves that we're not the only ones crazy enough to live without flooring for seven years or without an oven for five years or even crazy enough to keep thinking this is fun!

Houseblogs is a collection of people who blog about remodeling projects. You can find helpful hints, hilarious predicaments, and celebrations of a job well done--or at least finished.

And if you're lucky--like I was last week--you can win one of their contests--this one for stories of home-remodeling drama. Thanks Houseblogs and True Value Hardware!

I can't wait to stock up on supplies for the next project--if only I can decide which one to tackle first.

It's a miracle!

2009-10-12T16:00:00.001-04:00

This weekend, I learned that miracles do still happen. One swooped down and landed on our garage on Saturday. While I didn't witness the actual miracle occurring, the aftermath is still visible--and will remain so for a long time, I hope!

We moved into our house, with its detached two-car garage, 15 years ago. In that time we have NEVER parked two cars in it. Most of the time we haven't been able to park one car in it.

Chris is a Grand Poobah in the Distinguished Order of the Packrat. But this weekend he shed his packrat robes, threw off the grand poobah fez and cleaned out the garage. For the first time EVER we have both cars parked in it.

Poobah or no, I think he's pretty grand!

Sharpies: A remodeler’s best friend

2009-10-11T12:52:00.004-04:00

Fifteen years ago we spent all of our money (and all the bank would lend us) on two acres, a pool and a house that was dark as a cave and nearly as dirty—especially the ancient gold-brown carpet. We knew as we moved in that we’d have to live in the dark for a long while as we saved our money to begin renovations. But when after about six months the washing machine overflowed (during the disgusting-water wash cycle) into the carpeted hall, living room and two bedrooms, I thought I could move our new-floor covering schedule up a bit.

Chris came home to find me sitting on the living room floor with a box cutter and a screwdriver, cutting the carpet apart, pulling it and the padding up, and popping staples out of the sub-flooring. “Insurance is going to cover the new floor covering for us. Isn’t that great?”

It was partially great. We got new carpet and padding put down in the two bedrooms quick like a bunny, thanks to the insurance money. But we wanted to knock some walls down in the living room, dining room and kitchen areas, build new kitchen cabinets in new places, put in a new back door and add a pantry and powder room. “We can’t put the hardwood floors down just yet. But we’ll get started. It won’t take long,” Chris said.

We tore all the carpeting out, leaving rough plywood you couldn’t walk barefoot on for fear of getting splinters and cracks between the boards that you could drop into if you weren’t careful. Made it kinda drafty in the winter. And we started tearing out walls, moving along pretty quickly for us. (Chris was working as a remodeling contractor at the time, so like the cobbler’s children, the wife’s remodeling projects always came last.)

Until the appliance gremlins struck. Our oven went out (leaving us with a 1940’s large-microwave sized oven that sucked up so much power it had to be in a room all to itself, but that’s another blog post); our refrigerator died; the dishwasher (and I don’t mean me) quit washing; and the clothes dryer quit drying. Anyone who has done extensive remodeling knows that the only way you can survive in a house that’s torn to pieces is with a full set of functioning labor-saving devices. We managed to live without an oven for five years. But the rest of the appliances had to be replaced. There went our remodeling budget.

Now we had no floor covering, no drywall, and no oven. But we continued to have people visit, thinking, I’m sure, that they’d see progress in the work on our home. We did the only thing we could think of to entertain kids and grown-ups alike. We passed out Sharpie markers and let everyone draw on the floors.

Seven years after I first pulled up the carpet, we laid the oak flooring in the hall, master bedroom, living room, dining room and kitchen. It was a sad (but not real sad) day when we covered the artwork of our friends and family. But I gotta say, I don’t miss the splinters or as winter approaches, the drafts.

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value. It’s for their www.RightStartRightHere.com contest.

7 things I've learned from my dad

2009-07-29T11:18:00.010-04:00

Today's my dad's birthday. Rather than wish him the standard Happy Birthday, which I do wish him, I thought I'd honor him with a list of things he's taught me over the years. He was a math teacher after all, way early in his life--before I came along, thank goodness--however, math is NOT one of the things he was able to teach me.

Things I've learned from my dad:

1. Dogs are not only man's best friend, but can be woman's too.

Daddy and Leroy

2. Never buy a new car.

3. It's important to have hobbies, and if the hobby requires a costume, even better.

Daddy in his "assless" motorcycle chaps and Harley vest

4. A sense of humor helps in any situation and hides a multitude of sins.

5. A song can brighten your day, so learn the words and at least the bass part, even if you don't know the melody.

Daddy singing with Lesley and Jim

6. Thessaloniki, Greece, is a great place for a father-daughter trip

Daddy at the church of St. Dimitrios in Thessaloniki

7. Showing up may not be the only important part of fatherhood, but it is what I remember when I look back at my childhood. Thank you for always being there when I needed you or wanted you.

Happy Birthday!

I love Trader Joe's!

2009-07-24T11:01:00.003-04:00

Trader Joe's stores arrived in the Atlanta area a couple of years ago, much to my delight. I'm not a cook, so anything that makes that job easier or even a little more interesting, gets my vote. Besides, they have really cheap wine!

But this week, the good people at TJ's rose even higher in my estimation. I won the weekly drawing for a bag of groceries--just for bringing in my own shopping bag each time I go. Goodies, most of which I'd never tried, filled a Trader Joe's Atlanta shopping bag. Joe Joe's cookies, the organic tea-lemonade drink, bruschetta, a candy bar, a pasta sauce I had not tried before, fusilli pasta. So far it's all been YUMMY!

Thanks, Trader Joe! I'll be back soon to enter again!

Kirkpatrick double wedding extravaganza

2009-06-26T22:01:00.014-04:00

Clowns, jugglers, mimes, these were all suggestions from the double-wedding committee (family friends who had been giving opinions our entire lives) 22 years ago when my sister and I were planning our wedding. People look at us funny when Susan and I talk about "our" wedding, but given the outside committee we had to deal with, the grooms didn't get to have a lot of input.

On this anniversary, as I look back at pictures, there are so many things I remember I about that day.

The videographer (and member of the wedding committee), the late, great Harry Watters, rendered almost invisible, just like my mother insisted.

The wedding brunch. Daddy was presented with a trophy by committee chair Judy Watters for surviving (and paying for) the whole ordeal. The trophy reads, "Life's work well done; rest thee now."

My dress, which had been my aunt's when she got married in 1956, hanging from the ceiling fan while guests milled around in Mom and Dad's living room because it was too long to fit anywhere else.

Committee members and wedding director Sallie Estes and preacher Joe Estes, without whom the wedding wouldn't have come off at all. I'm sure we're still together because of the good work they did.

So many hands getting us ready. I've never looked so good and always wished for a gaggle of handlers who'd dress me and make me up every morning.

Lesley buttoning the hundreds of buttons up the back of the dress Mom made for Susan.

Sending Mrs. DiPlacido, the mother of bridesmaid Lesley, out for falsies. I'd lost almost 20 pounds in the month leading up to the wedding--nerves--and my dress didn't fit any more. She was the only one in the room with money and car keys.

Mom walking me down the aisle.

Daddy walking Susan down the aisle.

How handsome Chris (and his groomsmen) looked in his tux.

The beautiful music. Thanks in part to Harry Watters (son of the invisible man).

Exhaustion setting in as the after-ceremony pictures were taken. You know how long it takes for photos with one bride and one groom. Imagine how long it takes with two entire wedding parties.

Following a family tradition and cutting the cake (there was only one) with a saber. Made it taste especially good!

The wedding party

It's been a great 22 years. How could it not have been, with a start like that? Chris, I'd do it all again. Happy Anniversary!

Karen and Chris

Susan and Gregory

Daylilies and a rehearsal dinner

2009-06-26T14:51:00.006-04:00

Twenty-two years ago today was wedding eve. The day before an event the likes of which Huntsville, Ala., still has not seen duplicated. But the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner also stick in my mind, not only because they were a lot of fun, but because the dinner marked my introduction to daylilies.

The wedding was double, my sister and I got married together. Here we are at the rehearsal dinner, (Chris, Karen, Susan, Gregory) with the spectacular daylily centerpiece that my in-laws and their friends created.

We inherited those daylilies, which are blooming profusely this year thanks to a fair amount of spring rain. These are photos I took this week.

I wrote the following piece about our daylilies several years ago as public radio commentary. But the sentiment still holds true on this day when I find myself thinking about them and that very special time 22 years ago.

When I'm in a good mood, I look out at the thousands of daylilies blooming in our yard and think about our wedding. I remember the tables at the rehearsal dinner covered in gorgeous yellow and orange daylilies. I can almost see the arrangements at the wedding reception. Everyone says they were beautiful, but I remember those only from photos. I still hear the excitement in my then eight-year-old cousin's voice as she proudly showed me the daylilies she'd helped dig out of my new in-law's garden; daylilies she promised to plant in her own yard as soon as she got back home.

When my mood's not so good, I think of the many times we've moved the daylilies. After Chris' parents sold their garden property and moved to Florida, we transplanted 400 plants to our house near Five Points in Huntsville, Ala. Two years later, the daylilies needed dividing, so we moved 600 to our new place in Marietta, Ga. Our last move saw an increase in plants to more than 900. When I think about these moves, I have to get a glass of water and sit down.

This time of year, when the lilies are blooming so beautifully, in colors you never see planted along the ditch banks, I realize they are worth moving. They are so much more than the armloads of burgundy, pink, yellow, purple and orange blossoms that I gather every day for six weeks to decorate the fixer-upper. They are Chris' past.

Chris' mom and dad hybridized some of the daylilies and gave them names like Richmond and Salt Lake City. I can't look at their blossoms without thinking of the Kennedy's and what they passed on to Chris--a love of the outdoors and a concern for nature that shows in Chris' enthusiasm for recycling, growing vegetables and planting flowers, that's apparent in his willingness to move to the Atlanta area to please me, but only if I'll live on acreage in the suburbs.

It's morning now, the best time to cut flowers whose blossoms last only one day. Armed with scissors, I head up the hill to the garden. I guess I married the daylilies shortly after I married Chris. They're a lot alike, Chris and the lilies. Both quiet, hearty, good to look at and happy to be growing on our plot of ground in the shadow of the big city.

The practically perfect mini-vacation

2009-06-24T07:52:00.003-04:00

For the past few years when we've been to the beach, we've hit uncrowded, uncommercialized, less developed places like Jekyll Island, Ga., and St. George Island, Fla. But this year we went back if not to the heart of kitschy Florida, which is probably Weeki Wachee and the mermaids, then at least to its liver.

We traveled to Ft. Walton Beach, the home of sugar-sand beaches, emerald-green water, Big Kahuna's water park, the Gulfarium and a main street called the Miracle Strip.

I've loved our low-key beach vacations, but driving past Cash's Liquors and Fudpucker's restaurant on the way to our beachside condo, I found myself getting caught up in the Fun, Fun, Fun that pounds you from all sides before you even see the Gulf.

A high point--two meals in three days at the Back Porch, an open-air beachfront place where shirts and shoes are optional, but the seafood is fresh and fabulous. Their grilled amberjack (a white fish caught off the coast there) sandwiches invade my dreams, both waking and sleeping, on a regular basis, so I was glad to have two of them. Plus great onion rings and something I'd never had room for before, dessert--some ultimate chocolate concoction that will accompany the amberjack dreams for years to come.

Our waitress took this picture of us looking happy even before we'd eaten our meal.

So indulge your inner teenager and visit the commercial side of Florida every now and again. It's worth it, if only for the amberjack.

Boiling pig heads

2009-06-02T08:13:00.003-04:00

Nothing says summer in the South like the sight and aroma of boiling pig heads in the backyard.

Okay, so this little adventure had nothing to do with being in the South and everything to do with having a sister with a dead-animal fetish (and I mean that in the most wholesome sense of the word).

A student in one of her anthropology classes bought pig heads from a butcher, shot them with bullets, hacked at them with a machete, then buried them to see what would happen. Susan (the sister) was very pleased at the student's ingenuity. Then, joy of joys, when the class was over, the student told Susan she could keep the pig heads! Rapture!

Unfortunately they still had a little tissue attached. And nobody wants that. So, she brought them over to boil in Chris's outdoor, turkey-frying pot. (Thanksgiving will never be the same.)

The smell of boiling hog fat--it reminded me of the old-timey candle-making smell on steroids--permeated our yard and house for hours, but look at the payoff. Three perfectly clean pig heads preserved for college students for years.

Better sign up early! That class will fill up fast!

Happy Mother’s Day!

2009-05-10T20:32:00.004-04:00

I actually have the world’s greatest mom. Ask anybody who knows her. She’s smart, kind, sweet, loving, fun, interesting, caring. The list goes on and on.

But one of the best things about her is how good a teacher she is. She taught for a living, and over the years she taught me many important things, like …

1. Food is not the most important part of a dinner party. (Thank goodness, because I am not a cook, but I love having people over.)

2. Love really can be unconditional. She’s been mad at me, disappointed in me, unhappy with me, but I’ve never, ever felt like she didn’t love me.

3. Tolerance is the most important part of any long-term relationship.

4. If you want your children to care for you in your old age, you better be really good to them when you’re young and able and caring for them. (She was. Now we are trying to be especially good to our gaggle of nephews, since they will be stuck with us in our dotage.)

5. Having your nose buried in a good book is a great way to spend the day.

Thank you for everything you taught me, Mom! I love you!

A Civil War trench?

2009-04-16T06:51:00.004-04:00

We live in Georgia, work in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain--home of Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, site of the Civil War Battle of Kennesaw--learned the story (at the least the white Southern version) of the War of Northern Aggression before we could speak. But a Civil War trench, right in our own backyard? Doesn't seem likely.

We own a of residential lot, left over from Chris's days as a remodeling contractor/builder. We've had it on the market for a while, not really expecting it to sell in this economy, but as our agent says, "it doesn't hurt anything to keep a sign in the yard." Well, we got a contract this week. A very nice surprise.

A bigger surprise was one of the special stipulations on the contract. If a Civil War trench exists on the property, the buyers don't have to close. The picture that jumped into my mind when I read that was of Indiana Jones-type archeologists trooping through the wooded lot, then suddenly dropping into a trench filled with Confederate flags, muskets, and perhaps some long-dead soldier propped against the dirt.

Who is going to tell these buyers whether or not there's a Civil War trench on the property? I don't think the Yellow Pages has a listing for Civil War trench hunters.

How many pieces of property have the buyers tried to buy that had a Civil War trench on them? Why wouldn't they want it?

Our real estate agent, who has sold real estate in this area for many years, says she's never run across this issue before.

Maybe if there is a trench we can open our own historic site on the lot. But really, I hope there isn't one. Not so much because that means we won't close (though I do want to sell the lot) but because I want to go to the closing and ask the buyers about the stipulation and how they know there is no Civil War trench on their new property.

Anybody out there heard of this? Clue me in. I can't begin to figure this one out.

A man walks into a ...

2009-04-02T13:33:00.007-04:00

... OK, not into a bar. It's not a joke. Chris walked into the alternations shop the other day, wearing a cap because his bald head gets cold, to pick up a pair of pants he'd had hemmed.

He looked quite handsome in his cap, apparently, because Sandy, the owner, said, "You a very handsome man. You need more hats."

So, along with his pants, she handed him a large shopping bag full of a bizarre collection of hats and scarves. I know because he brought them all home. Inside the bag were such treasures as a pink and white baseball cap with an after-market elastic chin strap sewn on, a black straw hat with bright red band, a couple of straw driving caps, two fluffy burgundy hats that you'd have to be really cold to wear out in public. Picture Phyllis Diller-style hats. There were at least a dozen.

As I tried on hat after cap, I noticed that they smelled like little old lady, in a good way. A way that reminds me of my great-grandmother and maybe a little of my grandmother, from years ago. A combination of cedar chest and some floral, old-fashioned perfume or powder.

When I mentioned the happy smell, Chris said, "Oh, yeah, they said we might want to wash them before wearing them."

I yanked the weird fuzzy one off and flung it into the laundry room, where it and several others have continued to smell like little old lady for a couple of weeks. I didn't want to wash them and lose that aroma of childhood. But today I was determined to wash everything in the laundry room, dirty laundry's been breeding in there when I turn out the lights.

To my surprise, washing the washable hats and scarves (wool winter scarves, not decorative, floaty scarves) with my no-dyes, no-perfumes laundry detergent diminished the smell, but didn't completely kill it.

Now, thanks to my very handsome man, I can slip back to my childhood any time I want with a sniff of some little old lady's hats.

Monster Dog

2009-03-22T15:23:00.018-04:00

The secret sign in front of our house inviting stray cats in for care and feeding has now apparently been translated into dog.

We took to calling him Monster because of his bizarre shape. He seemed so huge lying down, then when he stood up he was revealed as a rottweiler body and head laid over a bassett hound chassis. He appeared to have been put together by a mad scientist, a sort of veterinary Frankenstein, or a committee that had to work with only the parts of dogs no one else wanted.

But his sunny disposition soon allowed us to overlook his physical oddities--like the front foot that pointed off to the left as if he was constantly signaling for a turn.

Friday morning, after he spent the night in our now barren vegetable patch, I put him in the backyard. Did I mention I was still in my pajamas? He promptly trotted down the few steps to the the pool deck and before I could catch him walked his large, weighty self out onto the center of the pool cover, which is just a heavy-duty tarp. Not designed to hold heavy-duty bassett-weilers. Then he got scared and wouldn't come back to the edge. He was sinking slowly into the disgusting muck on the cover, which was slowly slipping into the pool. With those short legs, drowning wasn't far off.

Carla, our friend and newly arrived tenant, grabbed the pole with the pool brush on the end and pushed at him from one side of the pool, while I took off my slippers and robe in the 40-degree morning chill, and slid down into the green, slimy muck, grabbed Monster's sturdy tail and pulled him to the side. Carla ran around to the edge and helped me lift Monster out. He shook off the slime and looked up at us with sweet brown eyes as if to say, "What next?"

The next couple of days were much less eventful, as he started to become one of the family. Then Sunday afternoon his real family saw one of the signs we had put out about a found dog. They lived just around the corner and were thrilled someone had him. He raced (you know, as fast as his tree-stump legs would allow) to their car, obviously equally thrilled to see his people.

And while I appeared as happy for them all as they were themselves, part of me enjoyed having this very unusual, easy-going dog around and would miss him. But now that the sign out front has been translated into canine, maybe another dog will stop by before too long!

My dad wrecked his Harley

2009-03-15T20:25:00.007-04:00

Over the past week the response I've gotten most often to "My dad wrecked his Harley," isn't, "How is he?" but, instead is, "Your dad has a Harley? Cool."

Because he is going to be okay, I can live with this response. And it made me realize I don't know anyone else whose 71-year-old father has a Harley that he rides regularly. (Or at least used to ride regularly. He's still not sure whether it's totaled or not.) He rides it so regularly, in fact, that he owns assless chaps and a reflective, nearly glow-in-the-dark Harley vest.

He chipped his sternum in the accident, a break that takes a long time to heal because there's no setting it, and he can't stop breathing to hold it still. But his doctor says he'll be fine because he works out.

My father, who was a couch potato of the highest order for at least as long as my mother's known him and they were high-school sweethearts, started going to the gym after he retired. Before the accident he went to aerobics classes three times a week, shaming the other people (mostly women, he loves that), who are more than 20 years younger than he is. He's still looking for his six-pack abs, but he's not carrying around a keg anymore, just a case.

So I hope his recovery time isn't too long. I want him to get back to the gym, so he can get back on his Harley. (Or his airplane. He flies, too.) While I worry about him a little on his dangerous toys, I know he's a very cautious man. And I'd worry more if he took to sitting in his recliner and never moving from in front of the television, because my mother would kill him faster than the motorcycle or the airplane.

Besides I love having the only dad around who has a Harley, even if it also means he owns assless chaps!

SNOW! March 1, Huntsville, Alabama

2009-03-01T21:51:00.005-05:00

For Eli's 15th birthday we ordered up snow! It was a gorgeous, windy, cold day.

My nephews, Eli the birthday boy, and his younger brother Jake, enjoying the snow.

It's always such a great surprise when it actually snows--especially in March.

Don't Murder Your Mystery

2009-02-17T08:01:00.010-05:00

I'm a member of Sisters in Crime. No, it's not a pack of gun-totin' women out to rob, maim and kill. It's a professional organization that promotes women mystery writers. We had our local (Atlanta) chapter meeting this week with Chris Roerden as our speaker. But, more than that, I got to host Chris overnight in my home! What a treat!

Chris has been a book editor for years, and has edited some award winners. She's also written an Agatha-Award-winning book herself, the editing guide "Don't Murder Your Mystery." She's now written "Don't Sabotage Your Submission," which expands on the editing principles in "Don't Murder Your Mystery," and applies them to other genres.

"Don't Murder Your Mystery" is a great book (I haven't read "Sabotage" yet.), and I give it lots of credit for helping get my manuscript in good enough shape to land an agent.

But the real treat for me was having Chris and her friend Pat Meller stay with us overnight. Not only did I get a signed copy of "Don't Sabotage Your Submission," which I'm looking forward to spending time with when I begin editing my next manuscript Redneck Hex, but I got to know two very interesting women and easy, delightful house guests.

It's one of the best reasons for a writer to get involved with professional writers' organizations: to meet other people in the field. Writing can be lonely work. I worry sometimes that my social skills have flown right out the window and buried themselves in the red Georgia clay below. But once a month I get dig them up, scrub off the red stains and talk writing with other people, exercise my sometimes under-used verbal communication skills. And on special occasions I get to host someone whose work I admire, and who turns out, along with her friend, to be someone I like, as well.

So, get out of the house and join a group. You can improve your writing and your social skills in one easy step!

Heard 'round the dinner table

2009-02-12T08:05:00.003-05:00

"A dead cat! She brought me her dead cat," Susan, my forensic anthropology professor sister, said.

"Wow! Your students must really love you," I said, after a bite of chicken vegetable soup.

"Yeah, they do. Next week she's bringing me her dead ferret. Will you pass the cornbread, please?"

Christmas in February

2009-02-09T14:27:00.007-05:00

Tacky or charmingly retro?

I've got to go with charmingly retro--though, in fact, it isn't retro at all, but the real old McCoy.

My grandmother and the aunts sat around a card table decorating Christmas balls for years, it seems. One year, when my sister Susan and I were maybe eight and nine, we got to help.

Grandma had tons of costume jewelry on the table. Lots of garish gold ribbon. Those weird satin-wrapped Christmas balls in every color imaginable (and some, like this odd salmony color, that really aren't imaginable). By the time she and the aunts finished the project, Grandma had an entire tree's worth of Christmas balls dripping in pearls, jewels and ribbon. She hung no other ornaments on her tree after that. Grandma latched onto a tradition and kept with it forever.

Grandma died in the summer of 2001. We didn't have Christmas on our minds at the time. But off and on since then I've wondered what happened to her Christmas tree ornaments.

This year I thought of them again as I was decorating our Christmas tree. When my aunt, my dad's only sister, suddenly passed away the week after Christmas, we found ourselves with her five children in the same town where my grandmother had lived at the end of her life. I asked my cousins about Grandma's ornaments. One of them, who had helped Grandma decorate her apartment and had stored some things for her, had the ornaments in his attic. He brought down a big Rubbermaid tub filled with the individually wrapped balls from what Susan calls Grandma's bordello tree.

We unwrapped them and found them in surprisingly good shape. The jewels still shone; the glue had held; the satin ribbon on some was frayed, but most of it was intact. We told stories about Grandma and my aunt. And we divvied up the ornaments.

The one in the picture isn't for a tree. It's too big, probably 6" around. Grandma hung it from her foyer light fixture, sort of a bejeweled mistletoe ball. I also got one of the sickly salmon-colored ones--seemed perfect for the pink Christmas tree--and a gold one with lots of pearls.

Tacky? Hell, I've got a Confederate States of America cuckoo clock in my living room. What do I know from good taste?

It's been so cold in Georgia ...

2009-02-06T09:03:00.003-05:00

... even the Pomeranians have broken out their winter sweaters!

Fashionista the Princess Prissy Pants

"Does this sweater make me look fat?"

Redneck wedding cakes

2009-01-28T18:27:00.004-05:00

These cakes are beautiful and weird! I can see them being served at the wedding of most any of my Redneck Tarot characters! Well, except Billy. He's having a Krispy Kreme donut cake.

Almost makes me wish I could bake--almost!

Whistling Dixie

2009-01-23T09:25:00.011-05:00

This is an entirely inappropriate blog post for someone who not only voted for Barack Obama, but also is thrilled to pieces at what she has seen from him in the days since his inauguration. But I can't help it. For as genuinely happy as I am to have a Democrat back in the White House, I am almost that happy to have temporary possession of a Confederate States of America cuckoo clock. Its tacky kitschy quality speaks to the tackiest part of my Southern soul.

Here's how we came to have it. Last week when my sister and I went to Huntsville, Ala., to surprise our mom for her birthday, we found a surprise ourselves. We walked into the living room, a room that has changed little since we grew up in it. A room that hosted my mother's liberal friends during all the dark years when they had to practically meet in secret due to the conservatism that permeates Huntsville. Despite its history, the room housed a CSA cuckoo clock, complete with Stonewall Jackson on a horse, Robert E. Lee featured front and center, and as we would soon learn, a cannon that pops out of the doors marked by the Confederate flag and fires three times on the hour.

After our parents got home, we learned where it had come from. One of my parents' friends received the clock as a gift back before Christmas. To this day, she doesn't know whether or not the giver was sincere in thinking the clock is a fabulous must have for every Southern home or whether he thought it was the funniest thing to come along since pink flamingos. Mom's friend knew what she thought. She also knew she had to keep the clock, because the giver would look for it when he next visited. Until then, she would share, because, really, no one needs a CSA cuckoo clock in their home forever.

So the clock was making the rounds of their friends, moving from person to person as birthdays came and went. We got lucky and happened to visit the day the clock was delivered from the previous, birthday recipient.

Well, I had to get on this merry-go-round, and Chris's birthday was the perfect excuse. He'd be thrilled to have possession of the clock for even a short time. I called Mom's friend and got us added to the rotation. While it was a sacrifice for Mom to give the clock up prematurely, I reminded her she'd get it back come July when Daddy has his birthday. She brightened considerably at the prospect, and is, I'm sure, at home now figuring what place of honor it can occupy.

Meanwhile, we have the clock sitting in our living room now, just inside the front door, until sometime in February, when it will pass to the next lucky birthday woman. I hear she's already found a nice spot in her garage for it. Some people just have no appreciation for the finer things in life!

Oh, it's cannon o'clock now. I believe a mint julep's in order!

While I'm fixing my drink, why don't you share something in the comments that you own and love that's embarrassing or politically incorrect?

Happy Birthday, Mom!

2009-01-18T16:10:00.003-05:00

It's just been birthday central around here lately. First Elvis, then my mother, then my nephew and Chris's is next Thursday.

But I can't let Mom's get lost in the shuffle. She turned 70 on January 14, an event my sister and I decided couldn't go by without some sort of celebration, despite Mom's insistence that she didn't want a party.

She got one anyway, an intimate party of four. Susan (my sister) and I drove from Atlanta to Huntsville, Alabama, on the 13th, arriving about 6:30 p.m., while Mom and Dad were at the gym. Daddy, who was in on the plot, had left the front door unlocked. We brought dinner, homemade chicken vegetable soup, angel rolls and birthday cake. Plus, we'd stopped at the Piggly Wiggly in New Hope, Alabama, and bought ice cream for coffee punch and to go with the cake. We set the table with Mom's crystal and china.

Leroy, Daddy's shih tzu, let us know when they were almost home. He starts whining whenever Daddy's car reaches the bottom of the hill. (They live at the top.) Mom opened the front door. Susan and I jumped from behind the sofas and shouted surprise. Mom fell back against the door, clutching her chest. Nearly giving us a heart attack.

Fortunately it was just surprise, nothing fatal. We had dinner and chatted like grownups until after midnight. Just the four of us, our original little nuclear family. Mom says it's the best birthday she's had in years. Maybe since she was 16 and her best friend threw her a surprise party.

It was fun for us too. We don't often do things that surprise our parents. We know each other too well after all these years. But she was truly and pleasantly surprised. Now, what will we do when Daddy turns 72 this summer?

Happy Birthday, Elvis!

2009-01-08T09:00:00.008-05:00

In honor of Elvis’ 74th birthday, I thought I’d give you a tour of our guest bathroom, known for nearly 15 years as the Elvis bathroom.

I wasn’t a huge, drooling, fawning, panty-throwing fan of Elvis. By the time I came around to liking his music, he was probably dead. Though living in the South my whole life I admit I’ve seen some folks who could have been him, but likely they were just huge, drooling, fawning fans.

But then I found this shower curtain.

I don’t know what drew me to it. Maybe Elvis possessed it? We had just moved into our trash heap of a house and decided that the hall bathroom had to be remodeled first. The shower curtain was the inspiration I needed. We have a lot of company. I couldn’t ask them to use the scary bathroom.

Instead we asked them to bathe with Elvis. We painted the walls in jailhouse stripes, to honor that horrible movie, Jailhouse Rock. (I’m not a blind fan, though I admit to liking Viva, Las Vegas.) A friend gave us a picture of Elvis in the shower. It’s actually a vinyl placemat, so it’s perfect for a bathroom. The moisture won’t hurt it.

Most visitors were happy to shower with the king. But I remember my grandmother coming out of the bathroom after her first shower saying, “I had to throw my towel over the shower curtain rod and cover that man’s face. I didn’t want Elvis seeing me naked.”

Appreciative guests inspired the only rule about the bathroom. When we began to receive Elvis things--refrigerator magnets, signs, a blanket, Christmas ornaments, a nearly life-size guitar-shaped Elvis clock—as gifts, I started to panic. I had visions of Elvis taking over the house. So the rule is Elvis stays in bathroom. It’s fittin', since that’s where he died. Well, not in our bathroom, but you know what I mean.

So, Happy Birthday to the King. Long may you reign—but only in the bathroom.

Music for the holidays

2008-12-18T09:04:00.003-05:00

I don't hold myself out there as a music critic. But I know what I like. And I like Christmas music that makes me smile and gives me energy to get things done while I'm listening to it (or keeps me awake if I'm in the car).

The Keith Taylor Trio's jazzy O Christmas Tree-O is just such a CD. And it's available on CDBaby. Check it out. It will put a smile on your face and a HO-HO-HO in your heart!

(In the interest of full disclosure, Jim Cavender, the bass player on the cd and the one in the middle in the picture is my cousin-in-law. He's also the one who introduced me to my husband many years ago. So he's long held a special place in my heart. But that doesn't mean the cd's not good. It's fabulous!)

First page

2008-12-13T11:49:00.003-05:00

Three months ago I felt brave (or stupid) one day and sent off page one of the mystery that follows Redneck Tarot (tentatively titled Redneck Hex) to Dear Author, a mostly romance review blog that posts first pages from readers each Saturday for other readers to critique.

Mine is up this week.

The critiquers have been very kind and insightful, offering constructive criticism about every item on the page, something I've noticed each week as I've read and often commented on the other first pages that have appeared.

So, if you're feeling brave (or stupid) and you've got a first page that you'd like some feedback on, give Dear Author a shot. Then read and comment on the others each Saturday. It's only fair that you offer clear, constructive, kind criticism to the brave souls who put their work out if you expect the same in return. And be patient. Like I said, I submitted in September, but it was worth the wait.

Now, I just need to get to work on revisions.

Bought books for the holidays

2008-12-09T21:18:00.003-05:00

As you can see by the widget to the left, I'm supporting buying books for the holidays. I finally made my contribution this evening, ordering several books as gifts for my mom, my nephew and my husband.

One of the best things about buying books as gifts, especially ahead of the gift-giving day, you can read them yourself first! Of course, you have to be careful not to spill coffee or red wine on them or let the cats gnaw on them or drop them on the floor where the dog will think they're a chew toy. But, if you can avoid all that, then books give their gifts at least twice.

So rush right out a buy a book for your favorite loved one or as a hostess gift or for your mother-in-law this Christmas. In these hard economic times writers and publishers need your support, and you can't beat a book for entertainment value.

Lessons learned and belated thanksgiving

2008-12-05T08:33:00.003-05:00

No, I didn't finish 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I got to 20,000 and realized a couple of things:

1. The book was going nowhere, at least nowhere I could figure. The GPS had completely quit after leading me down increasingly narrow roads with no view.

2. If I'm going to participate in the challenge again, and I might, I have to go in more prepared. I decided on a whim, on the last day to sign up, to participate this year, thinking maybe it would spur some sort of fantastical writing. But, alas, it didn't. I need to go in with more than a tiny spark of an idea that sounded great in my head at two o'clock in the morning, but somehow didn't translate to more than 20,000 words--and it required stops at numerous metaphorical gas stations to ask directions to get that far.

Because I'd essentially abandoned the idea before Thanksgiving (I traveled with my laptop, just in case. Mostly it sat in my room calling my name occasionally but without much hope.) I had a really good Thanksgiving.

That's a picture of our view from the Thanksgiving dinner table. (Thanks to Catherine Head, a cousin, for providing the photo!) Much of my husband's family migrated to south Florida over the last 15 years or so, (this was taken on the Isles of Capri) a series of moves for which we are especially grateful come Thanksgiving.

I'm thankful that his family is warm and welcoming and generous and fun. And on top of all that, they offer the sunshine and beauty of South Florida at a time when home (Atlanta area) is cold, gray and dreary!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-24T17:33:00.003-05:00

My husband, the dog and I are off for sunny South Florida for Thanksgiving with his (husband's not dog's) family. I hope you all have a lovely holiday with plenty of good food and good company. I'll be back next week.

We need a little Christmas …

2008-11-19T21:33:00.003-05:00

It seems wrong to be thinking about Christmas before Thanksgiving, but since this contest wants to know what we do in our homes for the holidays, and we visit my mother-in-law (in warm, sunny delightful south Florida) for Thanksgiving, I have to think about Christmas. Besides, I can no longer claim to be a Christmas traditionalist.

I’d been a purist about Christmas trees for as long as we’ve been married (21 years—YIKES!). I wanted a real tree, with that real tree smell and those real tree pine needles and it had to be nearly as tall as the ceiling. I don’t know where this need came from, probably my childhood deprivation. We decorated a bamboo in a pot at our house for all of my growing-up years.

Anyway, last year the southeast was experiencing a drought (we still are) of some significance, and I read that real live Christmas trees were dry and not likely to stay pretty through the holiday season. So, I broke down and bought a fake tree.

It’s not a traditional green or even a flocked tree. If we were going fake, we were going all the way. In keeping with the beach house theme, we got a pink tree. It’s the greatest thing! It looks wonderful with all of the pink flamingo and shell ornaments.

This year the drought is still bad here in Atlanta, though I haven’t read anything about Christmas trees yet (many of the trees in this area come out of North Carolina). But I’ve gotten kind of attached to the pink tree. I think we’ll go with it again this year.

Maybe by next year I can talk Chris into both—the pink tree in the living room and a real live green tree in the red room, a kind of combination den and office. How festive to have a tree in both rooms!

Better go. If I’m having two trees next year, I’ve got to stock up on ornaments.

“This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by SC Johnson’s Right@Home.”

NaNoWriMore

2008-11-10T18:59:00.004-05:00

NaNoWriMo needs to be renamed. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and is going on now. But it needs to stand for National Novel Writing MORE, because if you miss a day or, heaven forbid, two, the number of words you have to write to catch up becomes exponentially MORE impossible with every passing minute.

The goal is to have a 50,000-word novel written within the month of November, or 1,666 words each day. I did great for the first seven days. Then life got in the way. As of today, I am officially 6,666 words behind! When I wake up tomorrow I will be more than 8,000 words behind. And what am I doing--blogging. Because, frankly, it's a lot easier to complain about writing than it is to do it.

Try it, you'll see. Feel free to complain in the comments. Reading your complaints will provide me another much-needed form of procrastination.

The journey’s the thing

2008-11-07T07:54:00.002-05:00

Nearly 10 years ago, back when we had more energy than money (Now we have no energy and no money, but that's another story.) my husband Chris bought a Jeep. Not one of those nice Grand Cherokees that the commercials show going off-road, but that you know never leave the pavement because who in their right mind would get a $40,000 car mired in the mud. No, he bought a 1984 CJ-7, a rugged, no air-conditioning, no radio, no room for sissies, real man's Jeep. In other words, he bought a hobby.

For the first few months Chris' relationship with his Jeep was purely destructive. He moved my much nicer, much newer car out of the garage and pulled the Jeep in. “Only for three or four days,” he said. He spent hours over the next months taking parts off, cleaning them, oiling them, gazing at them all over the garage floor. Finally, he was ready for the next phase of his hobby, though my car wouldn’t move back into the garage for many more months.

Chris did lots of work under the hood, but I have no idea what that involved besides massive amounts of grease and oil, the parts disappearing from the garage floor and lots of time. He traded some old Cadillac parts (from his former hobby) for automotive paint. He painted the Jeep forest green with black trim. His cousin sewed a spare-tire cover out of cammo fabric, rendering him almost invisible in the woods. He ordered new seats and got a console for Christmas. Phase two was complete.

The next phase involved sharing his hobby with others (besides me!). He joined a Jeep club, a group of people who think spending all weekend either working on their Jeeps or taking them out in the woods to beat the crap out of them, thus ensuring they have something to work on the next weekend, is really living.

When the club goes on their monthly outings, near as I can figure they gather, then convoy to whatever remote, muddy, wooded, hilly site they have scheduled to visit that month. Then they drive their Jeeps verrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwly over trails.

Now, here is where the excitement reaches fever pitch. Sometimes one brave club member will creeeeeeeeep his Jeep even more slowwwwwly over a particularly steep rock or small hill. The other club members, whose Jeeps may not be tricked out (that's a Jeep term) to handle such an obstacle, stand around and watch this lone Jeep climb. Someone always documents these occasions with photos and video, and posts the blurry faces and mud-splattered vehicles on the club web site.

One blurry face is likely to be Patrick, one of the more fanatical, I mean devoted, members. Patrick spent $16,000 readying his Jeep for whatever rough terrain the world might throw at him. Patrick is unmarried, Chris added unnecessarily, but with a little envy in his voice.

For Chris' first Jeep club outing he left home at 8 a.m. and returned at 8 p.m. He only went 120 miles total. In 12 hours. If I tried to get him to drive to a spot 12 hours away, he'd act like I wanted to go to the moon. That phase of his hobby highlighted one of the major differences between us and our approaches to life. For Chris, in everything he does, the journey's the thing. Not me. I want to fall asleep in the backseat and wake up there--wherever there is. We've managed to work those differences out. Chris drives. I sleep.

But he won't be driving the Jeep anymore. He sold it. He hadn't been on a club outing in several years. Besides, it was tricked out just like he liked it. The journey was complete. Wonder where the next trip will take him.

Happy, happy, joy, joy!

2008-11-05T10:03:00.003-05:00

I went to bed last night before McCain's concession or Obama's acceptance speeches. I'd heard, from Shep on Fox News (the only channel we get on our dish-less television) that Obama won, but it was with some lingering sense of "it could all still have been snatched away in the night," that I woke up this morning.

But it wasn't a dream. Now, my problem, which, granted is small after the problem's of the last eight years, is I'm a blue voter in a decidedly red county of a red state. I've been reading about fireworks and dancing in the streets. The streets around my house were dark and silent all evening. Even my husband doesn't share my joy.

That joy, relief, hope, expectation, even happy surprise has to go somewhere, so you, dear blog readers, can share it with me. Let me know what you're doing to celebrate or not, as your political persuasion leads you.

Me, I'm mostly procrastinating, reading news stories and blogs, confirming to myself that history has been made and that I did wake up this morning to find the long nightmare is over.

I'm a Georgia voter!

2008-11-04T10:54:00.004-05:00

It was great! So easy and almost no line. I was at the polling place just 30 minutes, start to finish.

Now, don't start thinking there was no line because people in Georgia don't have the brains God gave a billy goat, so of course they ain't gonna vote. In fact, the woman working at the polling place said there were 75 people in line at 5 a.m. when she reported for polling duty. As I left, the line was almost twice as long as when I got there.

I guess I had good voting karma today. Hope that bodes well for all of my candidates. What about you? Have you voted? Got a good story to tell? Feel free to share it in the comments section below.

Celebrate America. Go vote!
Happy Election Day!

NaNoWriMo

2008-11-02T09:37:00.002-05:00

For those of you who don't know what that weird word in the title is, it's short for National Novel Writing Month. This is the 10th year that November has been NaNoWriMo. I first heard of it a couple of years ago, but never considered participating until this year. I found myself on Friday, October 31, the very last minute, registering without a thought in my head about what I'd write.

Now, two days in, I've got 4,200 words. The goal is to write 50,000 words in one month. (For those of you who are as mathematically challenged as I am, that breaks down to 1,666 words or almost 7 pages each and every day of November.) Don't edit, don't think too hard, just get the words out. The editing, revising, polishing or even the tossing out can come later. You're supposed to start something new, not work on something that's already in progress.

So, I've started a young adult mystery. I dreamed up--literally--the premise one night last week. We'll see if it can stand up to 50,000 words or more, in a month. I better get back to it!

Grandma’s ghosts

2008-10-30T12:18:00.004-04:00

In honor of Halloween, pull up a comfy chair, fix yourself a cup of hot cider, roast some marshmallows for s’mores, and I’ll tell you a true ghost story.

When I was about 10 years old, Grandma’s neighborhood was going downhill. She was considering selling her house, encouraged by my dad and my aunt, who wanted her to live somewhere safer. But Grandma was dragging her feet about the move. She'd raised my dad and my aunt in that house. My grandfather had died in that house. It was her home.

When a man bit off a policeman’s ear in Grandma’s front yard, she decided it was time to go. She sold her house and moved to a “better” neighborhood. The next month, when she was out of town for the weekend, her house in the better neighborhood was robbed. She came home to find they’d taken everything. The refrigerator stood open, and the food was gone; drawers were missing from the dressers; the handmade antique clock that had marked time on her mantle for years had disappeared; clothes, jewelry, sheets and towels had to be bought new.

But when we went to see Grandma a few months later (we lived in Alabama, she lived in North Carolina) she seemed to be doing well in her new house. She’d replaced her stuff and met her neighbors. And when she tucked my sister Susan and me in bed that first night, she said, “I’m going to tell you girls a true ghost story tonight.”

Grandma turned out the lights and sat down on the end of the bed. “Now, you know how I didn’t want to move out of my old house?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s not just because I loved the house,” she said. “It’s because your grandpop visited me there.”

Susan and I snuggled deeper under the covers. Grandpop died when I was six. How could he visit?

“Many times since he died, he’d come to see me in the night,” Grandma said. “He’d sit down on the end of the bed, kind of like I'm doing now, and ask me how I was. Then he’d tell me he was watching out for me. I’d fall asleep with him by my side.

“I was afraid that if I moved, Grandpop wouldn’t be able to find me,” she continued. “Since he died in the house, I thought maybe he couldn’t leave there. I didn’t know how being a ghost worked.”

Susan and I scooted closer together. We didn’t know how being a ghost worked either.

“Then I moved here. I got robbed, and I didn’t know the neighbors, and I was really lonely. And your grandpop didn’t visit me,” she whispered.

We scooted closer to Grandma, whose huge smile showed up even in the dark bedroom..

“Then about a month ago I was in bed. I looked up and there was your grandpop standing in the door to the bedroom.” She turned toward the door, almost as if she could still see him standing there.

“He sat down on the side of the bed, patted my leg and said, ‘Don’t worry about moving. Wherever you go, I’ll always find you. He’s been back to see me two or three times since then. And I’ve met some really nice neighbors. And I got all new stuff. “ She rubbed the new sheets through her fingers. “I think I’m going to like it here.”

As I grew up, I didn’t think about Grandma’s ghost story very often. I knew she believed, but I’d never seen a ghost and wasn’t sure I believed. Grandma died a few years back. Not long after her death, I was in bed, thinking about her, and there she was, in the doorway to our bedroom.

She sat down next to me, patted my leg and said, “Don’t worry about me. I'm fine, and I’m looking out for you. Wherever you go, I’ll always find you.”

What I want to be when I grow up

2008-10-30T10:31:00.003-04:00

This opinionated, this funny and this eloquent. There's some discussion in the comments about whether or not the bloggers really are in their 80s, but maybe that's beside the point. Given the number of hits and comments they're getting, they've struck a chord with a lot of people.

Meet Margaret and Helen.

Donkey with a death wish

2008-10-28T19:30:00.006-04:00

Part of the Harrowing Journeys blogapalooza, sponsored by Angela Nickerson’s blog, Just Go.

At the edge of the caldera, in the tiny town of Fira, on Santorini, my sister, Susan, and I peered out at the Agean Sea, marveling at a blue they created just for Greece. Our eyes traveled to donkeys ferrying people and things up from the boats docked at the old port below.

I don’t remember which of us thought it would be fun to hike the zigzagged path to the port, then ride a donkey back up, but it was a terrible, scary, asinine, stupid idea.

It was still fairly early in the morning when we started down the thousands of wide, uneven, cobblestone, horror-movie steps. But the sun that beat on the island in August didn't have a clock. We'd finished our water and worked up a sweat before we hit the half-way point.

At the port we poked into gift shops, bought a couple of trinkets and drank more water before seeking out our animal transport. We climbed a few steps, handed over our money and sat down on the next donkey that waited beside the top step.

A mother and her two teenage sons from Germany led our group, next Susan climbed aboard her ride. Our guide, a loose term since the donkeys all seemed to know the way to the top, would follow me. I watched Susan and the German family amble away as I sat down on the donkey from hell.

Before I could get a grip on the saddle horn, my donkey launched himself like a rocket. He aimed for the first zig in the zigzag path, slammed to a stop at the knee-high-to-a-donkey wall that bordered the path, hung his head over the wall giving me a donkey's-eye view of the edge of world, then turned sharply as if to scrape me off his back along the cliff, and raced to the next zag in the path. I clutched the saddle horn, my water bottle and my camera, with which I’d assumed I would take pictures from the back of the donkey, with one hand. The other hand held my hat on my head.

Moving at a gallop, we passed Susan on the second straight stretch. Her donkey strolled at a pace that allowed her to take pictures, enjoy the view, sip from her water bottle and laugh as I flew by on the demon. Once again, as he did at every zigzag in the path, the donkey stepped on the brakes with such force that I thought I’d be pitched over his head and crash to the rocks below.

On the third straightaway we passed the German family, who turned completely around on their nice, calm donkeys to point and laugh as the demon and I barreled by, doing what for a donkey must have been Mach 1.

Susan shouted from miles behind, “Take my picture. Turn around and take my picture.” Then she cackled, knowing there would be no turning around, no pictures on her placid critter as a reminder of how she’d lost her only sister in Greece: Death by donkey.

The demon slammed to its final (for my ride anyway. Despite its many attempts, it didn’t kill itself.) halt at the top of the path long before anyone else in our group rounded the last turn.

The Greek “guide” began to scream at me as he turned the final corner. I believe he was telling me to get off the donkey, but he was screaming in Greek, so I wasn't sure. And it didn’t matter. I couldn’t move. Somewhere around the fifth zig or zag, I had become one with the creature.

I sat, facing the cliff wall, trying to remember how to breathe, as Susan joined the yelling of the donkey man. “Take my picture, now. You’re sitting still, take it now.”

I managed to let go of my hat, grab the water bottle and saddle horn with one hand, my camera with the other and do as she asked. But I couldn’t turn. It was as if my butt was glued to that donkey. I aimed the camera behind me and without looking I took this awful picture.

Serves her right for laughing at my donkey with a death wish.

Don't forget to visit Angela Nickerson’s blog, Just Go. She's got goodie bags! From there you can visit other participating blogs.

Halloween Blogapalooza

2008-10-28T10:48:00.004-04:00

I've been too busy to blog lately, but this week I'm going to try to make up for it.

Tomorrow I'm part of a blogapalooza put together by Angela Nickerson at her travel blog Just Go. Participating blogs will all have stories about a harrowing journey, just in time for Halloween. She's also got goodie bags to give away to several lucky comment-leaving Trick or Treaters.

My post is about a ride on a "Donkey with a Death Wish." Check back tomorrow for that and hit Just Go for more on the goodie bags and to see who else has had a harrowing journey.

On Friday, in honor of the spooky day, I'll post a true ghost story about my grandmother, called, appropriately enough, "Grandma's Ghosts."

Little & cute, then what?

2008-10-21T08:35:00.004-04:00

When my nephews were little and cute, I can remember wondering if I'd still love them when they got to be big. What if they grew up and weren't any fun? What if they were mean? What if they were boring? I wasn't even going to venture into what if they became ax murderers, or worse. I was just worried about not liking them.

They are now 14, 11 and 9, teetering between childhood and adulthood. When I called their house last week, Eli, the 14-year-old, answered, and because they have caller ID, he launched immediately into, "Aunt Karen, there's an air show this weekend. Don't you want to go?"

Since Chris (my non-workaholic, he says, but constantly working husband) had to work, and my sister and her husband viewed this as an opportunity to ditch their offspring for a few hours, I took them on my own. The day was beautiful, sunny and warm, but not hot.

We rode a shuttle bus that arrived at the show just in time for us to see the F-22 Raptor through the bus windows. WOW! What a show that plane (that flies undetected by radar, so Eli tells me) put on. Stalls, flying straight up and straight down until I was sure it was going to crash into the crowd of people, then "walking" on its tail--its body vertical, but moving forward.

Next was an aerobatic bi-plane. The youngest nephew's favorite--he's into all things old right now. Lots of loops and spins and falls straight down, too.

Meanwhile, we also got to climb on and in a C-130, a C-5, and lots of smaller planes, including a "mosquito"--some World War II trainer--where the boys were allowed to sit in the cockpit, while a very nice, patient man told them all about how the controls work.

The grand finale: the Thunderbirds.

But what I loved the most was watching Eli be the leader. "Come one, Aunt Karen (because the younger boys followed wherever Eli led). We'll be able to see better over here." And watching the youngest one make his own fun. The noise of the planes and the sun shining in his eyes as he stared straight up got to be too much after awhile. So he sat in the grass and made a "whip" by tying together long, straight weeds. And the middle nephew was what he almost always is, interested in the planes, eager to see everything, and cracking funny jokes.

I've eased up a little on my worry that they'll grow up and I won't like them anymore.

Attack of the love bugs

2008-10-13T18:58:00.002-04:00

Okay, it’s a stretch to tie a lovely wedding to the mess that’s all over my car, but since they both involved love and I have pictures, I thought I’d give it a shot. Sometimes you need a challenge.

So, in chronological order: Attack of the love bugs, Part I

I drove from my house north of Atlanta to south-central Georgia a couple of weeks ago. I write about economic development (an elusive concept these days) in various Georgia counties for Georgia Trend magazine and was headed off to learn all there was to know about Coffee County. The first thing I learned is that to get there in late September you have to drive through the mating love bugs. Not only do they swarm so disgustingly that you can hardly see to drive through them, but they dry on the car in an instant. Then it takes dynamite and a crowbar to get the nasty bits off.

I fretted a little about not making a professional impression, what with my car looking like a giant had upchucked on it. But at least two out of three cars in that area looked just like mine—or worse. Two weeks later, following a car wash and several windshield washings, I can almost see clearly through the glass again, though bits of love-bug goo remain to remind me of my trip.

Attack of the love bugs, Part II

This was less an attack than a romantic encounter. We went to the Wedding at the Farm this past weekend. Friends of ours, Shannon Wilder and Curtis Johnson, got married at her family’s farm near Gadsden, Alabama.

The wedding itself took place in a grove of pecan trees that seemed to have been planted years ago for just such an occasion. The space between them created an outdoor chapel with the sun peeking through the leaves. Following the ceremony, the guests all wandered across the country road to the tractor shed where the sweet smell of barbeque drifted on the sounds of live music and the laughter of kids and adults. We could all see why it was the bride’s “favorite place in the whole world” and the place where she wanted to declare before friends and family that the love bug had attacked.

Once upon a time ...

2008-10-10T11:17:00.004-04:00

Every eye in the tent was on the woman sitting on a stool on a bare wooden stage talking about how she’d have lost her virginity if only the police hadn’t interrupted at a crucial moment the carefully researched and staged event. No one gasped or tut-tutted at the indelicate subject matter. We were too busy wiping the tears of laughter that ran from our eyes. Beth Horner, the virgin under discussion, was followed by Bil Lepp, who told us about how one of his college buddies, Paul, had built a submarine in his dorm room their senior year. The sub was so big they had to blast a hole in the dorm wall to get the pig-pink contraption out. (Bil won the West Virginia State liar's contest several years running.)

The National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, which comes up the first weekend of October each year, is like sitting around the Thanksgiving table enjoying a feast of the best family stories—with 20,000 of your closest friends and assuming your family includes the likes of matriarch Kathryn Windham, who barely leaned on her cane as she described her 90th birthday party this past summer, complete with comb chorus and a parade through downtown Selma, Ala.

Then there’s cousin Andy Offutt Irwin, you know, the weird kid who grew up to be the one everybody wanted to sit next to at dinner. Andy told about Aunt Marguerite, the 85-year-old founder of the Southern White Old Ladies Hospital, then Andy and his band, the Finger Monsters, played a song about his girlfriend Clarice who was a member of the Klan, and wouldn’t leave it, even for love. (That’s not clan like she was a family member, but Klan like the KKK.) We were all too busy laughing at the song to worry about whether or not it was politically correct for two African-American women to be singing backup on such a tune.

You know how some of your relatives are. Despite hearing from birth that it’s not polite to discuss religion, money or politics, some people just can’t help themselves. John McCutcheon is one who mixes all of the above with his music and stories, making most of the audience laugh and think at the same time. (Not to mention swoon. My mom and my aunt would have followed him home if I hadn’t been there to remind them that they’re both already married.)

While the National Storytelling Festival is like the Thanksgiving table of festivals, with its variety of the best the storytelling community has to offer stuffed down your throat until you think you can’t take another bite, smaller, kitchen-table festivals can be found all over the country. Just Google storytelling festival and your state, you’ll find something. Or visit storytellers’ web sites, where you’ll find links to their tour schedules. You can try just a taste of storytelling, rather than stuffing yourself at first with an entire feast.

Keep your audience in mind

2008-09-22T15:46:00.003-04:00

As a theater major at Florida State (Go, ‘Noles!), a storyteller, freelance writer and aspiring mystery writer, the phrase “always keep your audience in mind” has been in my brain for nearly my whole life. That idea is why debut mysteries have the body on the first page (or at least in the first couple of pages) because mystery readers—including agents and editors—have expectations. It’s why “if it bleeds it leads” became the mantra for television news. Someone decided that’s what the audience wanted. And it’s why authors at a book talk-book signing shouldn’t let their child take over the presentation.

Recently I went to a book signing at an independent bookstore near my house. I like the bookstore. The owner is friendly, knowledgeable and supportive of local and regional authors. This was a pay-to-attend event, not much at $5, but still. I didn’t mind spending the money to hear an author I’ve enjoyed. Author’s books are funny, so I had high hopes that Author would be, too.

But Author wasn’t. In fact, Author was unprofessional. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like kids, a lot. Sometimes more than adults. However, when I have paid $5 to hear an author speak, I don’t want an eight-year-old, no matter how cute and precocious, taking over the discussion.

Author, who was obviously completely distracted by the very loquacious child, nevertheless did nothing to stop the chatter. Author allowed the child to tell stories, answer questions that Author was asked by audience members, and whisper in Author’s ear several times as the two stood before 20-25 people who had paid $5 each (not to mention those who had already paid for Author’s books—in hardback, no less) to hear Author speak.

After 20 minutes or so of what felt like eavesdropping on a private parent-child conversation, I was relieved when Author gave up on the speaking portion of the evening, though moving to the book signing didn’t mean the end of the child’s performance. Author let us know that child also wanted to sign books, if we didn’t mind. (The child is mentioned in the book, which is non-fiction.)

Chris (my husband) and I left without buying a book, which I would have done if I’d enjoyed Author’s talk. If I’d enjoyed the talk, I’d likely have gone to hear Author again or maybe signed up for one of Author’s workshops, because I’ve heard good things about them. But I won’t now. Author broke the first rule of entertainment, which is what Author’s books and book talks are: Always keep your audience in mind.

Feel free to leave a comment about book signings you’ve attended—good or bad. Or let me know if you think I overreacted. (Though I have to say, Chris felt the same way, and he has way more patience than I do.)

Ahoy, me hearties, it’s Nana’s birthday!

2008-09-19T15:57:00.004-04:00

That’s pirate speak for “Hey, y’all, it’s my grandmother’s birthday!” She’s 91 on this International Talk Like a Pirate Day. We hope she won't be walking the plank anytime soon.

Here’s a picture of her (she's second from the left) and my mom and my two aunts from last year at our family reunion to celebrate her 90th.

Nana's not doing great this year-—forgetting things, though she still remembers people and faces, if not names. And her body’s wearing out. Much too slowly to suit her, she says. But she’s still around at 91, which gives all of us coming up after her hope for ourselves. (Her mother lived to be 93! Shiver me timbers, but the women live a long time in my family.)

Some of my best memories are of Nana young and fun. Going to her house meant liver mush for breakfast. Neese's is the best (and only) brand we'd eat. They call their liver mush liver pudding, but our family never used the pudding label. YUMMY! It’s a sausage-like dish, only so much better, sold only in North and South Carolina.

And she played games with us, like Tripoli—which was just like gambling, only we got to use her pennies, not our own. We felt very grown up! So YO HO HO and a Bottle of Rum to Nana on her 91st!

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has pirate jokes, in honor of today. Take a peek and try them out on your friends. Maybe you’ll get pieces of eight for your efforts.

Or to learn all about the holiday (really, is it a holiday?) hit the Talk Like a Pirate website, where the activity has passed “on fire” and is now “volcanic.” Check it out. It won’t cost you any dubloons!

So, avast ye, landlubbers and feel free to post any pirate jokes you know in the comments section.

Web site WOWs

2008-09-18T10:09:00.002-04:00

Okay, maybe not WOWs, but I did do a little work on my web site. See the woes posting from last week.

The site definitely needs more, including a heavy dose of pizzazz. Unfortunately my web skills are enough for the basics but don’t stretch as far as bells and whistles.

Thanks to all the folks who looked it over and offered suggestions. I took many of them, which made it better still.

Take a look at the new and slightly improved Kennedy writing site and let me know what you think.

I'm embarrassed I never read ...

2008-09-10T14:07:00.005-04:00

A quickie today from the Washington Post book blog Short Stack, about books people are embarrassed not to have read.

I read a lot, though I've never been a huge fan of "important" fiction or the "classics."

But bless my heart, the book I'm most embarrassed, as a lifelong Southerner and lover of the movie, not to have read is Gone with the Wind.

I'll get to it. 'Cause tomorrow is another day!

So, tell me, what are you embarrassed to admit you've never read?

Web site woes

2008-09-08T16:52:00.005-04:00

As a professional freelance writer and editor I have a web site. I’ve never mentioned it on this blog because I’m not thrilled with it. I put it together myself, and you can tell. It’s bland, but I always figured it did the job I needed it to do. It has writing samples, tells a little about the services I offer and has a link to this here blog—where lots more writing samples are available.

Now, though, I have an agent for a mystery I’ve written, Redneck Tarot. She’s trying to sell it. In order to help her do that, and I really want her to do that, I need a web site that reflects more of my fiction writing, rather than business writing. They are two entirely different animals. And yet, I can’t afford, at this point, to hire a fantastic web designer. Though I’ve found one I really like and drool over her work and wish that she were mine. The things she could do with Redneck Tarot cards.

Anyway, that’s a ways down the road. Meanwhile, I still need the business-like site. But a page with a brief synopsis of the book and some sort of intro that is much less businessy than the freelance pages would be great. I’d also like to post some of the Redneck Tarot cards—I don’t have pictures, but each chapter in the book starts with a description of a card and the divination. For example:

III Outside Women (The Empress)

Picture on the Redneck Tarot card: Three women in raggedy cut-off shorts and bright-colored tube tops. They’ve been generous in their application of makeup and have cigarettes dangling from their clown-red lips. They all have their fingers crooked as if calling you over.

Divination: Outside women are hussies, women a married man sees outside the bonds of matrimony. If this card turns up, you are in for a world of confusion. You’ve got a hankering for things you can’t seem to get, because you can’t put your finger on what it is exactly that you want.

Oh, and I want to do it all without having two sites to maintain.

Here’s the link. Be forewarned, it’s not great. But, maybe I get points for recognizing that and trying to make it better.

Any suggestions left in the comments area would be monumentally appreciated!

Dead Aunt Karen or Happy Birthday to me

2008-09-03T09:17:00.006-04:00

Today (September 3) is my birthday. It’s not a BIG ONE, though it’s big enough to suit me. We’re not doing anything very exciting—Wednesday birthdays don’t lend themselves to much in the way of going out or partying. Though I already got one present today-- Furry Happy Monsters. Guaranteed to wake you up happy!

But several years ago, when I experienced a BIG ONE, my sweet husband, Chris, threw me a surprise party that achieved its goal. I almost had a heart attack when I walked in the house (my sister, who was in on the whoop-de-do, had taken me out to lunch) to find 40 people dressed in their tropical finest, pina coladas in the blender, exotic eats and a mountain of gifts. It was great fun.

My sister, Susan, who got all the baking genes in the family, made me a cake. She got a “Barbie” from the dollar store, laid her out on the cake and wrapped her in a shroud. Susan said that she’d made the cake the day before and put it in the fridge. She then had to chase my then-three-year-old nephew out of the refrigerator until the party. He kept going in to gaze at the cake, lovingly I'm sure. The first time she asked what he was doing he said, “I’m staring at Dead Aunt Karen.” I was touched.

Following the party he carried Dead Aunt Karen around for weeks, until finally she really died. All of her limbs and even her head fell off, and she wasn’t as much fun anymore.

This year, Jake, the now-nine-year-old nephew, (no, that’s still not enough info for you to figure out how old I am) gets the real thing for my birthday, not the imitation Dead Aunt Karen. Chris and I are taking him to visit my parents this weekend. And while it’s my birthday, Jake has already put in his order for food and activities.

“Those 3-inch round steaks with the bacon around them (Mom made the mistake of fixing our little carnivore filet mignon one time. He’s never forgotten it, though he has trouble remembering the name.); chocolate meringue pie; and barbeque (which for those of you not from the South, means pork).”

After eating, he wants to “go to Moontown and fly in Papa’s plane. And don’t you have a museum here? (They live in Huntsville, Ala.) Let’s go there. And those caves we went to once. I want to go there again. And to the library, not that little one near your house, the big one. And can I get a movie and watch it while I eat my pie? I’ll sit on the floor on a towel so I don’t spill it on the rug. …”

While getting older doesn’t thrill me, I have to say, I’m glad I’m not Dead Aunt Karen. I’d hate to miss the fine food and activities that Mom and Jake have planned for my birthday weekend.

For a birthday party today, visit Rebecca's blog. It’s her birthday too, and she’s celebrating by breaking things. And leave a comment telling me about your favorite birthday memories. That’s all the present I need!

I hate moving!

2008-08-27T14:13:00.002-04:00

You think moving a household (or a house, for that matter) is hard, try moving a business full of heavy equipment when you're too cheap to hire movers!

My husband owns 3-D Graphics & Printing, a large-format printing business. But just because it's HIS business, doesn't mean I'm uninvolved--and becoming more involved by the minute! Click here you'll see a photo of me holding up a very large aerial photo of Jacksonville Airport that we printed.

Anyway, I say all this to explain my blogging slackness--after trying to do better this month. I'm part of an online group that had an August Blog Challenge--to try to blog every day for a month. I didn't sign up to do it because we were out of town, had company, got found by a new cat (looks like his name will be Stewie, since his head is sort of football shaped, like the baby Stewie on Family Guy--a show I can't stand, by the way) and had this move scheduled. But I convinced myself I'd blog at least twice a week.

So, soon the move will be over. We have to be out of the old office space this week. And I'm sure Stewie will eventually get over the GOD-AWFUL diarrhea that has had the poor little demon locked in the Elvis bathroom for two days (because we spent a small fortune on cat medicine for a stray, free cat and he better get better!) and maybe life will calm down.

Crazy cat lady?

2008-08-21T20:26:00.002-04:00

How many cats do you have to have before you become a crazy cat lady?

Six years ago, Miss Kitty appeared on our doorstep right before Christmas in the freezing cold. Our first cat (we're really dog people) she's with us still.

Last year about this time, Dusty Cat showed up in our yard. We were determined to keep him an outside cat, which was easy for me. He wasn't very nice at first. But then it got to be winter. Despite living in Georgia, we do experience winter. So, long about Christmas we got him neutered and brought him in the house. He's now about the sweetest cat I've ever seen. He seems, in fact, to think he's a dog. (It took Miss Kitty five months to come out of our bathroom. But now she likes Dusty Cat okay.)

Now, a really cute black cat, with a white spot on his chest and great, huge green eyes, has shown up. (All I can figure is word's gotten out in the kitty community that there's a crazy cat lady on the street, so drop by. She'll take you in.) He's small and friendly and now he's injured, probably from a fight. His face is swollen. He's hot--like with an infection. Chris (the otherwise fabulous husband) has been battling the adoption of this third cat. (We also have a dog, the Princess Prissy Pants, a Pomeranian.) But he admitted when he got home today that "other cat" needs to go to the vet. So, I guess he's ours now. Miss Kitty's going to hate him.

So, we have 3 cats, I guess, and 1 dog. But, I also have a husband. Do the dog and the husband balance out the 3 cats to keep me from being a crazy cat lady? The whole idea makes me nervous, but not nervous enough to not take Blackie/BullsEye/Snowflake/ whatever his name is, to the vet tomorrow.

Meet Billy Poteet

2008-08-18T20:43:00.003-04:00

Chris, another blogger/writer, posted this on her blog and challenged folks to introduce their characters--or think about the facts as they relate to their characters. So, here's a brief introduction to Billy Poteet, the 20-something-year-old sidekick in my as yet unpublished mystery Redneck Tarot.

Eight Character Facts

1. Your Character's Favorite Word:
Anything that rhymes and can be combined with "damn." Damn-spam is a favorite--and he doesn't mean the annoying e-mail kind of spam.

2. Your Character's Favorite Pastime:
Shooting televisions from the comfort of his outdoor recliners.

3. Your Character's Oddest Thought:
How many bites would you have to take of a cat before it died?

4. Your Character's Favorite Food or Snack:
Hamburgers and beer

5. Your Character's Worst Memory:
When his father died.

6. Your Character's Likes or Dislikes:
Billy likes the small, north Georgia town he lives in. He hates anybody messing with his friends or family.

7. Your Character's Favorite Dessert:
Chocolate cake that his mother made.

8. Your Character's Worst Moment:
When his twin brother Beau decided to leave home and go to college.

Feel free to share some facts about your fictional characters or maybe some of the real characters you know.

Do not try this at home

2008-08-14T15:54:00.002-04:00

No, I never claimed to be a good cook. But, honestly, any idiot ought to be able to bake a potato in the microwave.

Get a load of the mess that appears when a potato explodes all over the oven! I swear I poked holes in it.

What the picture doesn't show is that the potato skin was completely empty. Every bit of the inside blew out, leaving a hard, crusty, empty shell.

It’s a good thing Chris can cook, or we’d be living on cold cereal and restaurant fare for the rest of our lives.

Word games bring new names

2008-08-12T16:58:00.005-04:00

I was tagged to play this game, but maybe you're headed into the witness protection program or you've been asked to star in the next superhero movie. Sounds like fun, but you can't use your own name. The folks at your day job just wouldn't understand. This meme will help get those creative naming juices flowing.

1. Your real name:
Karen

2. Your Gangsta name: (first 3 letters of real name plus izzle)
Karizzle

3. Your Detective name: (fave color and fave animal)
Red Dog (sounds like a beer, to me!)

4. Your Soap Opera name: (your middle name and street you live on)
Ann Rich (Not terribly exciting. I"ll probably be killed off or at least go into a coma in the first season!)

5. Your Star Wars name: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name)
Kenka (Are you sure this isn't the porn name?)

6. Your Superhero name: (your 2ND favorite color, and favorite drink)
Pink Wine (What a weenie sounding superhero!)

7. Your Iraqi name: (2ND letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, 1st letter of your middle name, 2ND letter of your moms maiden name, 3rd letter of your dads middle name, 1st letter of a siblings first name, and last letter of your mom's middle name)
Anaoesa (One more reason to be glad I wasn't born in Iraq!)

8. Your Witness Protection name: (parents' middle names)
Emma Neely (or Neely Emma)

9. Your Goth name: (black, and the name of one of your pets)
Black Prissy (A name that actually describes the dog, a black Pomeranian)

Feel free to share your own alter-egos' names! It's fun.

Top 5 reasons to find and stick with a critique group

2008-08-10T18:54:00.003-04:00

Part II of my joining groups post:

Recently I’ve read blog posts and comments from writers who’ve had bad experiences with critique groups, including this one here. I just thought I’d share the other side of the experience. I’ve been in the same critique group more years than I like to think about, and I wouldn’t be a writer without them.

That said, here are my reasons for happily sticking with them:

No. 5
I’ve become a better writer for critiquing the work of other people. Part of my day job is editing newspaper and magazine copy, not books. By thinking about what works and what doesn’t work and why as I read other people’s fiction, I learn to recognize those same things in my own writing.

No. 4
They are all good at different things.

Carol can see the big picture. She moves sentences, paragraphs or even whole scenes around so that they make more sense or build more suspense than the way I had them.

Cindy, with her eye for detail, catches little mistakes, like if a car changes color or make from one page to the next, or if I use the same word too many times over a couple of pages or in a scene.

Jan’s background is business writing, she’s even taught it. There ain’t a grammar or punctuation rule she don’t know, and breaking one guarantees a mark from her blue pen. If it’s a rule broken on purpose, she’s OK with that. (For example, when setting a mystery in the Deep South, sometimes you have folks who say “ain’t” and “don’t.” See previous sentence but one. Bless her poor little Yankee heart, she finally got to where she could live with seeing the word “ain’t” without circling it.)

Kathy, whom I think of as the vampire in the group, likes to suck out anything extra—words, phrases, entire pages of dialog. Nothing is sacred when her red pen bleeds over the page.

No. 3
They are all professionals and behave as professionals. They recognize that the words are mine. They don’t try to change my “voice.” (A real challenge for a bunch of Yankees who were forced to read a manuscript called “Redneck Tarot,” not once, but several times. Actually, they taught me a lot about phrases and behavior that I thought was universal, but learned needed to be explained.)

No. 2
We are all happy for each other’s professional (and personal) successes, whether it’s finding an agent, getting that grant-writing job or having a poem published. Again, it’s a matter of being professional about what we do.

No. 1
We have become great friends. We have seen each other through divorce, illness, the death of one of our members, and the deaths of parents and children. But we’ve also enjoyed the good times: Christmas dinners, pictures and stories of trips to Italy, pride in each other’s accomplishments.

I recently got a real-live New York agent to represent “Redneck Tarot.” I couldn’t have done it without my patient, kind, smart, professional friends in the group known as the Thursday Night Slashers (except when we meet on Tuesdays). Thanks, y’all!

PS: If you’re interested in a critique group, try professional organizations as a starting point. I’m a member of Sisters in Crime. The other members of my critique group are all members or former members. If mysteries aren’t your thing, look around on the Internet for other professional organizations.

Sisters in Crime

2008-08-08T08:28:00.002-04:00

In the last few days I’ve read several blog posts and comments about writer critique groups and professional organizations—some have been pro groups, some have been anti groups, often so opposed that I found myself wondering who had beat that person up so badly in a group setting.

I’ve been a member of Sisters in Crime (writers and readers of mysteries, not a merry band of female criminals) and a smaller critique group for many years and would not have gotten where I am today (granted, it’s not some high, exalted place, but still, I’m happy) without them.

So, without further introduction, here are my Top 5 Reasons for Joining and Sticking with Sisters in Crime. Tune in next time (either this weekend or Monday) for my 5 reasons for sticking with a critique group, which has occasionally been known as the Thursday Night Slashers, but generally isn’t really known as anything fancy.

No. 5
I’m not a joiner. I’m perfectly happy sitting at home in my pajamas (like right now, they’re bright green with flamingoes, how could I not be happy?) and writing about Redneck Tarot, Fiona and Eyeball Tate, and murder in the fictional town of Grand Junction, Georgia. But honestly, if you don’t ever go out and see other people, find out what they think and like and dislike and how they react to words and deeds, you can’t write well-rounded characters—or at least I can’t.

No. 4
The opportunity to meet smart, nice, supportive, interesting people. Sisters in Crime started in 1986 by women mystery writers who realized that women writers were paid less, reviewed less, and generally received less respect than male writers. And they got together to do something about it. Twenty+ years later Sisters in Crime is an international organization with thousands of members, both male and female, readers and writers, which offers support and encouragement to people from beginning writers to professionals who’ve written many books.

No. 3
The chance to hear fascinating speakers at our Atlanta Chapter meetings, from Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents who have walked us through fascinating cases to editors like Chris Roerden, who’s book “Don’t Murder Your Mystery” and talk to our group helped make my mystery “Redneck Tarot” something that a real-live New York agent agreed to represent.

No. 2
Introductions to writers and books I never would have found. Through Books in Print, the Sisters in Crime publication that lists members’ mysteries and mystery-related titles, the Sisters in Crime list-serv, at local chapter meetings and in talking with others who love to read mysteries, I have found writers and books that I never would have discovered if I’d stayed in my happy pj’s and never left the house.

No. 1
Mentors. Patricia Sprinkle a past international Sisters in Crime president who now lives in the Atlanta area and writes books that I enjoy and have bought for my mother and grandmother, and Kathryn Wall, Atlanta chapter member who writes the wonderful Bay Tanner mystery series, both read the first three chapters of my manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions for making it better.

No. 0 (I know, it’s really 6 reasons, but I write fiction, I don’t do numbers)
My critique group. I met them all through Sisters in Crime. More on them next time.

So, get out of your pjs and out of your house and find a group that can help to make your work better and your life much more interesting!

Beach car for the Burbs!

2008-08-06T08:39:00.003-04:00

I'd never heard of Amphicars, cars that go on land and in the water, until I read my most recent Coastal Living magazine last night while waiting in the MommyVan (No, we don't have children, and I don't even drive the van. Chris, the male spouse in this marriage, drives the fairly beat up 1998 Windstar and dubbed it the MommyVan.) for Chris to pick up his 1976 pickup truck (we don't do new cars) that had to have transmission work. It wouldn't go in reverse; a real drawback in a longbed pickup!

Anyway, I've got to have an Amphicar. It's the perfect beach house in the burbs car--part convertible/part boat. My birthday's coming up in September. For those of you planning to get your shopping done early, this is what I want! I prefer the Fjord Green, but am willing to go with the blue or white in a pinch.

Get one for me and I promise to take you for a ride!

Human and Animal Waste Contamination!

2008-08-04T11:10:00.005-04:00

These are not words you want to read in the same sentence with “beach,” especially when it’s the beach you are spending a week at, and the words are followed by the advisory, “don’t swim.” But it’s what we ran into on , an island off of Apalachicola, in the northern Gulf of Mexico. According to the nice man at the St. George Island State Park, this happens every year—YIKES!

We managed to have a good time anyway. Here’s a picture of my dad, on the eve of his 71st birthday, wearing his beach booties (he’s the only man I know who can call size 13 shoes “booties” with a straight face!) while walking his dog, Leroy. This was the day before the advisory went out. We didn’t get Dad or his booties back on the beach after this.

When the beach outside our door became unavailable, we headed to St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, about 45 minutes from St. George. It was a beautiful park. (Chris says all beaches look the same, water + sand, but I disagree. Some are cleaner--even without the “waste” advisory--others have dunes, some have clear, blue water.) St. Joe has a nice flat beach, high dunes covered with waving beach grass, and high winds. Chris reacted to the wind, which kept yanking his hat off (his head is shaved, so a hat is important) by pulling a MacGyver. He tied his hat strings to his bathing suit strings. Not a pretty look, but it kept his hat from flying off.

In other weird beach happenings, our 9-year-old nephew saw “the wrong end of a naked man” coming out of the water along Hwy. 98, between Port St. Joe and Mexico Beach, where the highway runs right beside the water. His only comment, said with eyes big as dinner plates, “Thank God it wasn’t a woman!” Despite our driving back and forth along that stretch of highway several times over the next few days, we never saw the naked man—wrong end or right!

What I did for my summer vacation

2008-07-25T10:34:00.003-04:00

Our vacation is coming up (I thought it would never get here). And that got me to thinking about the best vacation I’ve ever had. It was a couple of summers ago when I went to Greece for three weeks. So, check out my vacation memories, then tell me about your own. Let us see the world from the comfort of our computers through your eyes.

The trip to Greece wasn’t a typical see-75-cities-plus-50-islands-in-three-weeks tour. I spent two weeks in Thessaloniki in northern Greece (with a weekend side trip to Crete), then a week on the volcano island of Santorini.

My husband, Chris, (who’s practically perfect in every other way) won’t fly. So, I have to find travel companions elsewhere. Fortunately I have a family (parents, sister) that I like and that likes to travel. My sister, an anthropology professor, travels to Greece almost every summer. Two years ago she taught in a study-abroad program in Thessaloniki. My mom and a friend of hers signed up for the program. My dad and I, who never took school nearly as seriously as did the other family members, decided we just wanted the trip, not the study.

While Susan and Mom taught and studied (Mom was determined to make an A, despite our pointing out that her permanent record didn’t matter so much in retirement) Daddy and I spent two weeks walking the interesting streets of Thessaloniki, where on one block you find ancient Roman ruins dating from the 700s, right next to a church from the 1000s, with 1960’s era highrise apartments overlooking them.

On Crete we ate lunch one day in Mochlos overlooking the Aegean, just down from the taverna in the photo below. I never wanted to leave. It was the most relaxing, tranquil, beautiful place.

Fortunately we did leave (though it was tough). But if we hadn’t, we never would have gotten to Santorini, which is the most spectacular place I’ve ever seen. You stand on the rim of the caldera (the bowl that was left when the volcano erupted about 3,600 years ago) looking at the houses and buildings that cling to the nearly vertical sides and wonder how they were built and how people manage to get all of their belongings into those little structures when donkeys are the only things that can carry any sort of load through the town.

This year we’re off to St. George Island, Florida. A quiet little island (Can you tell I have a thing for islands?) off Apalachicola on the Florida panhandle. Not nearly as exotic as Greece, but you don’t have to fly there from Atlanta, so Chris is going.

Let us know where you’ve been or where you’re going.

It’s all Greek to me

2008-07-23T14:20:00.003-04:00

My sister just got back from the Greek island of Crete, where she spent a month “working.” She’s a physical anthropologist and was cataloging human skeletons—not very old ones by Greek standards, only 600-700 years!

Anyway, she brought us back this little painting on wood.

It says “good morning” in Greek. Pronounced ka-lee-MEH-ra. The traditional place to hang these, according to Susan, is over the bathroom mirror, where you will see it every morning. If we’d done that, it would have been butt up against the ceiling and tall as I am (5’10”) I never would have seen it. So we hung it between our bathroom mirrors. It makes me smile every time I see it. (The bathroom walls are pink, not purple, which is the color they look on my computer. Chris calls it Barbie's dream bathroom.)

Now, I mention all this Greek goodness to explain the new screen doors. See, we got a cat. New cat, Dusty, scared old cat, Miss Kitty—whose name ought to be scaredy cat, since she’s afraid of everything—so that Miss Kitty started going into the guest room and yakking on the carpet. After six years of blocking off the rooms with baby gates, Miss Kitty suddenly realized she could jump the gates.

With a beach house theme, I thought screen doors on the guest rooms were a great idea. But Chris, hubby and the one who’d have to install said doors, remained unconvinced. “Screen doors inside is just weird.” Until Kitty yakked once too often on the guest bed.

After finally agreeing to install the doors, he expected I’d paint them white. Now, we have a lot of white in our house: all the trim work, some beaded board wainscoting, kitchen and bathroom cabinets, so I’m not opposed to white. But these are screen doors, inside the house. They begged for something interesting to be done to them.

Taking my inspiration from Greece—Santorini, specifically, where I went with my sister to a conference a couple of years ago—I painted them blue. This photo is of a door in Santorini.

I love the screen doors. They keep the cats out; they keep the a/c flowing (we’ve had mildew problems); and they look great. So great, in fact, that even Chris likes them.

These are our screen doors:

And, yes, that is an Elvis shower curtain visible in the background. More on the Elvis bathroom in a later post.

She knows whereof she writes

2008-07-19T11:02:00.002-04:00

This blog post, Writing a Novel, A Love Story, from Libba Bray is hilarious about the ups and downs of writing a novel:

http://libba-bray.livejournal.com/36896.html

Enjoy!

Letting light into the tomb

2008-07-18T14:11:00.002-04:00

The first time we walked into our house, my reaction was, “Ohmygod, it’s dark as a tomb!” My second reaction was, “We can fix that.”

The house had 2 acres, nearly unheard of in the northern suburbs of Atlanta even 14 years ago, and a pool. With a remodeling contractor husband, Chris, I knew we could redo the eyesore of a house that came with the great piece of land.

The biggest project we tackled, and we’ve redone the entire house inside and out, was the kitchen. It sat in the middle of the house, dark and uninviting, walled off from the tiny dining room, with almost no counter space. Shortly after we moved in, the oven and the dishwasher both died.

We replaced the dishwasher immediately. I could live without an oven, but not without a dishwasher. In fact, we lived for five years with only an oven from the 1940s that one of my mother’s friends gave us. About the size of a large microwave, the oven lived in a separate room from the kitchen because it tripped the breaker if any lights or other appliances were used while it was on. We’d have to take a flashlight with us to check to see if the food was done, because if we turned on an overhead light, the breaker blew.

When we finally dived into the kitchen remodel, we lived without any cabinets, except for the one that held the sink, for a couple of years. But the wait was worth it. Chris built the new cabinets for us. They are 3” taller than standard. Chris and I are both 5’10” tall. While Chris calls the cabinets “freakishly tall,” I think he’s glad he added the height. I know I am!

I love the black grout with the white subway tiles. It doesn’t show a bit of dirt. And I’m even happy with the Formica countertops. One day we’ll upgrade to something else, I like the look of concrete counters, but for now, these look great.

We removed the walls separating the kitchen from the living room and dining room and expanded the kitchen into the breakfast area. It’s not a formal house, so we decided we didn’t need a formal dining room. One larger eating area is better than two small ones. The expansion gave us lots more counter and cabinet space, plus allowed room for an island that I don’t know how we’d have lived without.

The hardwood flooring, which we put down in the kitchen, living room, dining room, hall and master bedroom (the house is all on one level) was the hardest job of all. In fact, it nearly killed my dad, who graciously helped us lay the unfinished, tongue and groove oak. I thought maybe he’d never walk upright again, but he recovered, and still speaks to us.

Though the plan had been to paint the floors red—I’d seen a house in Architectural Digest many years ago that had red-painted floors and loved them—Chris couldn’t bring himself to do it. Once the wood was down, he liked it too much to cover it up. So, we stained it very lightly and coated it with polyurethane.

When the floor color changed, that meant the wall color had to change. We opted for Julep Mint, a Sherwin Williams color that seems to morph from blue to green depending on the light. It’s a perfect choice for a beach house in the ’burbs.

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value.

Blackberry pickin' time

2008-07-16T15:53:00.003-04:00

Every summer our yard turns into a jungle. With nearly two acres of trees, little grass, several hundred daylillies and a willingness to let it all be natural, by this time of year, the yard begins to look like no one could possibly live amongst all that greenery. And while I gaze at photos of beautifully manicured and landscaped plots and suffer pangs of garden envy, I get over it by picking blackberries throughout the month of July.

For those of you who've never picked blackberries, let me tell you, it's a challenge. Blackberry bushes have big, sharp thorns that prick at your clothes or bare legs. And they grow in the shade. You can't just stand at the edge of a blackberry thicket and pluck berries without getting dirty. Nope, you have to get in amongst the thorns, where chiggers and snakes like to live.

The first time I remember picking blackberries I was a teenager. My uncle had told me that snakes like to live where blackberries grow. My job, I decided, rather than actually picking berries, was to beat two sticks together and holler, "go away snakes," on a regular basis. My strategy worked. We didn't see a single snake that day.

I'm not quite as vocal now in my snake-shooing. But I do wear shoes and socks and keep one eye on the ground at all times, looking for anything that slithers. A jungle like ours could comfortably harbor serpents the likes of which haven't been seen since the garden of Eden.

It's worth the scratches, the chigger bites and the fear every time I pop one of these homegrown berries into my mouth. I guess as long as blackberries are the payoff, I'll admire landcaped yards in photos and keep the jungle we call home.

Oldest Living Blogger

2008-07-14T11:28:00.004-04:00

Olive Riley, who has been called the oldest living blogger, died over the weekend at a nursing home in Australia. I confess I wasn't familiar with Ms. Riley or her blog until I read about her death this morning. And I don't feel sad about her passing. I didn't know her. She was 108. It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. What I feel is uplifted by her life.

My 90-year-old grandmother (a spring chicken compared to Ms. Riley) is in a nursing home. She had a stroke several years ago. But even before that horrible event, it seemed that her willingness to expand herself and her world had faded. We tried to get her interested in email--she has children and grandchildren scattered around the country--or books on tape--she loved to read, but her eyes were failing her--but she couldn't summon any interest in new technologies that might have helped make her days better. Now, she's not in the physical condition to learn anything new. And it makes me wonder. Do people who remain connected to the world around, who continue to learn new things and stay interested in others, who maintain an open heart and upbeat attitude live longer, happier, healthier lives?

Maybe Olive Riley wasn't happy. I don't know. But it appears she was. Her final blog post mentions singing a happy song with one of the nurses and other residents. I find that inspirational and not a bad way to go out.

My day job

2008-07-11T14:58:00.003-04:00

When people ask what I do, I have the hardest time answering. I've said, "depends on what day it is," and "if it's Tuesday, I must be a writer." But neither of those really say enough about the fun I have on a daily basis.

Take today, for example. Today I was doing manual labor in an un-air conditioned warehouse in Georgia in July, on the production end of my husband's large-format printing business. (I'd link to his web site, but it's under construction. When it's up, I'll post it.) Not only does he print really big stuff--signs, posters, museum exhibits, etc.--he also has an enormous CNC router--a computer-run router for cutting shapes out of wood, plastic, sign board, all kinds of materials. Today I was running the router, cutting life-size superhero shapes out of this lightweight plasticy/foam boardy stuff, that I'm sure has a name. I don't know what it is.

You more astute readers will be saying to yourselves, "She ain't doing that now. Now she's blogging." (Though maybe the more astute of you wouldn't use the word "ain't.") Yes, I'm blogging, something I've been meaning to do for days. And it's all because the coupling broke on the router. There I was, pushing the buttons, making the router bit go, when it stopped cutting all the way through the material.

So, now I'm waiting, on Friday afternoon, of course, because these things always happen on Friday--unless they happen on the weekend--for Chris (the husband, man of my dreams) to find a new coupling (coupler, one of those). You'd think if one could be found anywhere in the world, you could find it in the Atlanta area. But not so far. And of course the work must be finished and delivered to the customer by Monday. Which means we'll work all weekend, if Chris can find the part.

Which gets us back to what I do and how I answer that question. I work with Chris at 3-D Graphics & Printing probably 20 hours a week or so, including lots of weekends, because Chris is a workaholic. (Don't let him hear you say that, he'll just deny it as he speeds by on his way to the office.)

Other times I'm a freelance writer, mostly for Georgia Trend, a business/economic development magazine in Georgia. I spent one day this week in Hall County, Georgia, doing research for a magazine piece--but that's another blog post.

And in my spare time I write mysteries. I've just gotten a real live New York agent, who's trying her mightiest to sell Redneck Tarot. I just know she is. And when that happens, I'll have an easy answer when someone asks me what I do, because mystery writer will move to the tip of my tongue.

No, it's not a pond!

2008-05-21T12:20:00.001-04:00

But try telling that to the Canada geese who took up residence on our pool this spring. We had some trouble with the pump that keeps water off the pool cover during the winter—the trouble was it quit working and we never replaced it. So disgusting brown, pond-like water filled the pool. When we took the cover off, I couldn’t blame the geese, it looked like a pond to me too.

A pair of geese has rested on our neighbor’s pond (a real one, not a pool) for years. But this year with the drought in Georgia, I guess their pond didn’t look as inviting. The couple didn’t bypass it completely, but they seemed to look on our pool as their vacation pond. They’d mostly hang out next door, then when they needed a break from the old home place, they’d head to our pool.

Or it could have been the vicious Pomeranian, Princess Prissy Pants, who lives at our house that kept the geese at bay. She enjoyed barking at them, but actually never got too close. Though they should have been used to attacks by small dogs—our neighbors have two Chihuahuas, which by weight almost equal our Pom.

But fun with wildlife in the pool didn’t end with the geese. On day two after uncovering the pool, action-hero Chris (my husband) rescued a pitiful drowning chipmunk from the murky water. He fished him out with the net, dried him (or her, how do you tell with a chipmunk?) off with a towel, then when the little thing still didn’t seem to be recovering fast enough to suit the man of steel, Chris got the hair dryer and gave the critter a blow dry, a haircut would have been extra. The chipmunk recovered and scampered off to the soothing tones of YAP! YAP! YAP! from the resident yap dog.

A drowned rat (literally, nothing figurative about the way it looked) was next. But since that doesn’t have a happy ending, I won’t go into detail.

We’re planning the first human swimmers this weekend, provided the chemicals have finished doing their job on the goose poop, chipmunk fur and general dead-rat ookiness.

Brrr!

2008-03-25T11:21:00.003-04:00

So the guy came out Saturday to look at the furnace, declared that the blower motor had burned out, and we'd have to wait until Monday to get a new one--it being Easter weekend and all. And that will be one finger and three toes for the good news.

Fortunately, this being the South, it wasn't miserably cold on Easter. Though we woke up to 55 degree temps in the house Sunday morning. By keeping a fire going in the traditional wood burning fireplace in the great room all day and having 17 people huddled in front of it drinking hot chocolate, we managed to get it to about 70 degrees. Warmer than we keep the thermostat.

We hid eggs, ate too much, including the cutest cake shaped like a lamb. It was red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, so looked just like lamb brains and innards when we cut into it. It inspired many gross comments, but tasted great!

So, while all the chaos was going on at our house, our cat, Dusty Cat, disappeared. He tends to do that when we have kids over (we don't have any of our own) or my parent's dog, Leroy, the killer shitz zu, visits, because he barks at Dusty. We couldn't find him Sunday night when we went to bed and usually he senses when everyone leaves and hurries home, but not always. So we weren't really worried. But yesterday it was cold outside and windy and he still didn't reappear. And we did begin to worry.

Meanwhile, a different guy from the heating and air company came to fix the blower motor and discovered that it was fine. The circuit board had actually burned up==he showed it to me. He managed to get the heat on, which the guy on Saturday should have been able to do, he said. But had to go back to the shop for the right part. So late yesterday afternoon, after shelling out the rest of my fingers, 2 arms and 3 legs (I had to get one of Chris's) we got heat. Just in time for sub-freezing temps last night! Yippy!

So last night as we were getting ready for bed, Chris tiptoed out in his jammies, bathrobe and stocking cap (he's got a shaved head) and heard Dusty meowing, faintly. Chris called me out and with flashlights we looked all around, listening to him cry, but he wasn't getting any closer.

Chris finally managed to catch Dusty's eyes in his flashlight--he was trapped in the crawlspace of our neighbors' house! They are adding a master bedroom to the front of their house, which faces the back of our house sort of catty-cornered. Their house is at the back of their 2-acre lot, across a small pond from us. So, it's a long way from our fence to their house. And because they aren't moved into the new bedroom yet, they couldn't hear Dusty crying.

We wandered over, me in my jammies and a coat, just to confirm that's where he was, and sure enough, we saw him looking out at us. But the door to their crawl space is right under their current bedroom window and we were afraid they'd shoot first and ask questions later if they heard people breaking into the crawl space at midnight. So, we walked back home and called the neighbors--all their lights were out, so it looked like they weren't up. Fortunately we know them very well.

Don met us at the crawl space door in his jammies and bathrobe and we got Dusty out of the crawl space. Don said Dusty had to have been in there since shortly after lunchtime on Sunday. That's when Don had noticed the door open and closed it. I swear Dusty had lost weight. He seemed lighter weight when I picked him up, which wasn't until we got to back to our house. He raced ahead of us, looking back every now and then to be sure we were coming. Soon as we opened the front door, he ran to his food and yowled for chow. Poor little guy.

This morning he was ready to go out again, but I couldn't do it. It's only 30 degrees here this morning and I didn't want to worry about him again!

Happy Easter!

2008-03-24T10:31:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm a day late, but the sentiment is sincere. We had a really nice Easter, which was a surprise given that we had no heat and 17 people at our house for Easter dinner!

My parents arrived Friday to spend the weekend. Friday night after dinner, we were playing cards and started smelling something like electrical burning. It was in what we call the red room (formerly a garage, now an office/den). We wandered all around the room, sniffing and feeling outlets to see if they were hot. The electrical box is out there, it wasn't hot either. We couldn't find anything. We went back to playing cards and the smell got worse. We all got up and tried the sniff and search again. Still nothing. By the time it got to be bedtime, the smell was not as strong, so we didn't worry too much about it.

Saturday morning I woke up cold. That doesn't often happen. We have a programmable thermostat set for the temp to go up in the mornings. I pulled on my big fuzzy robe and went to look at the thermostat. It said the temp was 59 degrees in the house and the heat wasn't on. Chris was already up, but he had both his laptop and one of our cats in his lap, so he hadn't noticed that it was cold in the house.

So, here we are, Easter weekend, 17 people coming for dinner on Sunday, my parents spending the weekend with us, and no heat. I made coffee while Chris checked on the thermostat (Maybe it was the batteries. Nope, not that.) and the furnace (The blower wasn't blowing.). And the coffee maker overflowed coffee-ground filled black sludge all over the kitchen counter. The day was just getting better and better.

About the time I got the mess cleaned up and a new pot on, Chris figured out he couldn't fix the furnace and started making phone calls. He actually found somebody who'd come out on the Saturday of Easter weekend without charging us an additional arm and leg (on top of the regular arm and leg for a service call). Turns out this was because he didn't know what he was doing!

We have heat now, but had to give up all of our limbs to get it! More on the saga tomorrow.

Last one on KTW, I promise!

2008-03-10T09:47:00.002-04:00

Our Selma, Alabama, tour picks up at the library.

I swear, this will be my last post on this. It was just such a great weekend I couldn’t resist reliving it!

We didn’t get to see the Kathryn Tucker Windham Conference Room at the Selma Public Library, a meeting was in progress. But we didn’t need to see inside the room named for Miz Windham to recognize her influence. First, every person we saw in the beautiful, well-appointed, book-filled library knew who she was the second we walked through the door. Second, paintings and photographs of her fill the space. Third, she knew every inch of building, from the offices to the children’s room. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated money for computers for the library, she told us. And even visited Selma to present the money. They stayed at the St. James Hotel, an old hotel recently renovated, according to Miz Windham. Overlooking the river, the hotel has balconies and ironwork, which make it look like something from New Orleans.

After the library we took a quick driving tour of the rest of Selma—both the good parts and the not-so-good parts. Miz Windham is obviously interested in all things about her town, including architecture. We saw a lovely section of beautifully restored 19th century homes and an area where gentrification is coming more slowly, but where the frame houses, many with gingerbread trim, often have stars carved in the eaves or over the doors. She’s tried as long as she’s lived in Selma to find out what the stars mean or who added them to the trim work, but she still doesn’t know and says most people don’t even seem to notice them. Daddy was driving too fast for me to get pictures of any stars. By this time he was becoming worried that we wouldn’t get Miz Windham to Huntsville in time for dinner at the church and we’d be barred from town for life for making her late.

Charlie Lucas, a folk artist who does a lot of metal sculpture is her neighbor. He wasn’t home, but she said he wouldn’t mind if we looked through his backyard, which is filled with sculpture—a Trojan horse, an ironing board with mop-hair and a face, among other equally interesting things. I think he’d be great to have for a neighbor, but I live in a neighborhood where nobody much bothers anybody else about what they have in their yards. He probably wouldn’t be real popular in some of the newer subdivisions with covenants about how long your trashbin can stay by the street.

She has several pieces of his in her house, including a really cute camel made from railroad ties, a sculpture of a soldier going off to war—and because war can make you cry, he’s carrying a windshield wiper to wipe away the tears—it’s a fabulous piece, and a painting of Miz Windham dancing in a blue dress, looking joyous.

But finally it was time to start home. Fortunately we had a storyteller in our midst to keep the miles flying by. She tells about growing up in Thomasville, Alabama, a small town about 60 miles from Selma. She tells about Gee’s Bend, where the beautiful and unusual quilts that have been shown at the High Museum here in Atlanta, among other places around the country, were created. It’s a tiny black community that for decades was cut off from the rest of the world because of its location on a tiny piece of land in a bend of the Alabama River. The lack of a bridge or ferry service across the river made it an hour drive just to get to the county seat.

She then spent the weekend telling listeners in Huntsville some of the same things that she’d told us in the car. But it didn’t matter one bit. Like little children who want to hear the same story over and over, I could listen to her stories again and again. They make you laugh and think and remember and grateful to be alive.

“Who is she?”

2008-03-07T11:26:00.001-05:00

Obviously after just a couple of days—though I’ve heard Miz Windham tell stories for years and read “13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey” as a kid (it was practically required reading in Alabama, where I grew up, filled with great, creepy stories)—I don’t know all about who she is. But she manages to give quite a bit of herself away in a short amount of time.

She’s a woman who’s lived through a lot—in her town and in her personal life—and yet she appears to have come through it thinking the best of people and demanding the best of herself.

We stopped at the Live Oak Cemetery after lunch. According to Miz Windham, Selma is the northernmost point where Live Oaks will grow. They are scattered throughout this beautiful cemetery that looks like it ought to be in Savannah or Charleston rather than an inland Alabama town. They’ve been burying folks in Live Oak since the early 1800s—back when they knew how to bury their dead. I’ve included a photo of one of the more spectacular monuments, for Drury Fair Jones, who was buried in 1878.

I had no idea Spanish moss grew on anything but Live Oaks, but the azaleas (which were not blooming this time of year) and the camellias (which were blooming beautifully, see the second photo) were dripping with the grey-green moss. I could have spent all day wandering around.

But we had other places to go. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the Bloody Sunday Civil Rights March, 43 years ago this week, was on our list of must-sees. The bridge is longer than we expected, with a “memorial” on the side outside of town. I put memorial in quotes, because it does little to honor the dignity of the marchers with its rundown, almost tacky, brick-set plaques. The bridge was actually named long before it became infamous for a Confederate general, who went on to serve in the U.S. Senate and is buried in Selma. I like to think he’s rolling over in his grave at Live Oak.

Next up, the library, with its Kathryn Tucker Windham Conference Room, among other goodies. But that’ll have to wait until later.

Kathryn Windham, from Selma, Alabama

2008-03-05T10:21:00.002-05:00

At storytelling festivals that's the only way Miz Windham wants to be introduced: her name and where she's from. But I want to tell a little more about her, in case you don't know who she is. Because I got to spend much of last weekend with her and enjoyed every minute of it.

Sometimes when you meet someone you’ve admired, you find you don’t admire her as much anymore. Their humanity shows, with all of its warts and blemishes, leaving you feeling a little disappointed.

Kathryn Tucker Windham, a storyteller, writer and photographer from Selma, Alabama, who (whom?, I never know) I have admired for years, wasn't like that. I came away from the weekend not only not disappointed, but inspired to write more, tell stories more and find ways to be a better person. Pretty powerful stuff to pick up from a woman who will be 90 in June.

She was one of the featured storytellers at a storytelling festival in Huntsville, Ala. My parents and I were assigned the enviable task of driving from Huntsville to Selma (about 3.5 hours) to pick Miz Windham up on Friday. But this wouldn’t be a quick down-and-back trip. Miz Windham has lived in Selma for 53 years and is proud of her town. She wanted to show it off to a couple of first-time visitors. (My dad had been there before, but Mom and I never had.)

We were reluctant to leave her house—which is like the best kind of museum. A collection of interesting photos, some of her with famous folks from Alabama, some she’d taken; of paintings and other art people had given her (her neighbor is folk-artist Charlie Lucas); of the fake leg with the fake blood coming out the top that she talks about in her stories; of quilts from a quilter in Gees Bend, Alabama. But she assured us we’d have time for the tour after we got back from lunch—at the best barbeque place in the world.

While Hancock’s barbeque was good, I’m not sure it’s the best I’ve ever eaten. But it was obviously a favorite of Miz Windham’s. They all knew her in there. She told us a story (she told stories all day, making the tour and the drive home fly by) about how one week she’d had a newspaper reporter come interview her on Monday and she’d taken him to Hancock’s for lunch. On Tuesday she had a different reporter come, and she took him. On Wednesday a friend from her college (she went to Huntingdon) came, and she took him to lunch at Hancock’s. And on Thursday yet another reporter ate lunch with her at Hancock’s. The same new waitress served her and her male guests all four days. After lunch on Thursday, the owner, a woman Miz Windham knows, walked up to her, smiling. “The waitress just came back and said, ‘That woman’s been in here every day this week with a different man. Who is she?’”

More about who she is in the next couple of days.

A new family member

2008-01-14T13:11:00.000-05:00

No, the addition to our family isn't of the two-legged variety, but he does cry an awful lot, is very needy, has the other "kids" jealous, and, I'm afraid, is going to require that we do some home remodeling that we never intended.

Dusty is a tom cat who appeared in our yard back in the fall. He was scrawny and mean. So, as Chris says, we treated him like a wild bird, putting food out for him but not even trying to pet him. Gradually he became friendlier, it's amazing what a little food will do for your attitude, and when it began to get cold (even in Georgia it can get cold) we decided he had become our cat and we needed to figure out how to incorporate him in the family. We already have a very scaredy, indoor cat named Miss Kitty and a pomeranian who is small, but in charge.

We (the royal "we," it was actually Chris) wrangled Dusty into a crate and took him to the vet to be checked out before bringing him in the house with the other animals. They pronounced him healthy, gave him his shots, and we made an appointment to have him neutered after Christmas. But he continued to spend most of his time outside. He likes it there.

Now, thanks to an undescended testicle that required abdominal surgery, he's an inside cat until Friday--and he's driving us--including the other pets--crazy with his constant meowing as he roams from window to window gazing longingly at the great outdoors. (That's in between attacking our feet, hissing at the dog who dares to eat and live in his prescence, and scaring Kitty into hiding under a bed in a room she's not supposed to go in.)

We brought him home following his surgery, this cat who has never lived indoors, and discovered that the concept of using a little box is not inbred in cats. He didn't go to the bathroom anywhere for about 30 hours. I had visions of him exploding and sending cat s*** all over the house. After many phone calls to vet, mostly along the lines of, "are you sure it's worse for him to go outside with stiches than to never go to the bathroom again?", we trapped him in the laundry room with the catbox, now filled with dirt, and he finally went.

The remodeling we'll have to do is figuring out some way to keep Miss Kitty, who after discovering that Dusty wasn't going anywhere, decided she could jump the baby gate that has successfully blocked her out of the guest bedroom for 6 years, from snuggling up on the guest bed. We have too much company that's allergic to cats. Besides, as soon as Dusty's stitches are out, he'll figure out that if Kitty can make the jump into the guest room, he can too.

I'm thinking about putting a screen door across the door. I could paint it some bright beachy color. We can't just close the door. In the winter it isn't too bad, but in the summer it would wreck the air flow and we'd have mildew growing in the closet. I know this because it's happened before.

So, despite the fact that the bathroom is what I wanted to tackle next, thanks to a new family member, who we don't yet love, I think we'll have to get a new bedroom door.

Looking for inspiration

2007-10-21T18:00:00.000-04:00

When your beach house is in the ’burbs, rather than at the beach, sometimes you have to hit the coast for some inspiration. While the house I’m staying in on St. George Island, Florida, offers little in the way of home décor inspiration, the view more than makes up for the serviceable but unremarkable place.

From the comfort of a screen porch (an essential for any beach house, whether in the ’burbs or not) overlooking the beach, I have watched storms roar through, enjoyed the perfect beach day (yesterday, it was breezy, sunny, low 80s, the Gulf was like glass) and nearly been blown to Timbuktu.

St. George Island is off the coast of Florida, east of Panama City. I first came here as a Florida State student. It’s about an hour and a half from Tallahassee. The island is long and narrow, with a state park taking up about a third of the east end. The rest of the island is houses, a few shops and restaurants and a couple of inns and motels—all low-rise. It looks like the Myrtle Beach I remember from my early childhood, before it got so built up. (I’m dating myself, I know.)

When I was in college, we came here one February day—the advantages of going to college in Florida. The weather was beautiful, high 70s, sunny, but the water was freezing cold still. Back then (the early 1980s) the island was nearly deserted. Few houses, the state park was only a couple of years old. We just parked the “sin den,” as someone christened my 1978 Gold Buick Electra 225 that was big enough to raise a family in, by the side of the road, tromped across the dunes (no worries about protecting them in those days) and laid out our beach towels. We were the only people on the beach. All was fine until I had to go to the bathroom. Like I said, the water was too cold to get in. And I’ve never been one for going behind a bush. I planned to walk back to the car and drive it to the one convenience store on the island and use their bathroom. But the enormous, heavy car was stuck in the sand (now they have signs telling idiots like me not to pull off the side of the road and park). I had to go in the water. I waded in just as far as I had to, did my business and when I came out, my legs were blue from the cold. I huddled under my beach towel, trying to get warm and figure out what to do about the car. I had friends with me and we all had to get back to school that day. Fortunately a nice park ranger cruised by in his Jeep. He stopped and asked if we were the ones stuck in the sand, laughed when we admitted we were and pulled us out for free.

The people here are still nice, though as a friend learned, it now costs $70 to have your car towed out of the sand!

But I’m having no bad days at the beach this trip. Even today, the windblown day, isn’t bad. My poor dog, Prissy the Pomeranian, and I couldn’t take our morning walk on the beach. She’s built so close to the ground that the wind kept blowing sand in her eyes. She tried to walk backwards to keep the sand out, but that didn’t work. After she did her business, right quick, I might add, I picked her up and carried her back to the house. So we’re sitting inside (it’s too windy even to enjoy the porch) with the French doors thrown open. The breeze wafting through the house and the roar of the surf—no longer smooth as glass—are all the inspiration I need.

Party time

2007-07-30T14:33:00.000-04:00

One of the best things about getting most of the remodeling work done on your house is that you can finally invite people over. We went for 5 years without an oven, 7 years without floor covering in the living room, dining room and kitchen, and more years than I can count with exposed studs and crumbling drywall.

Now, most of those things are taken care of (There's still one room with no floor covering, just the subflooring, but it's looking really nice with the magic-marker drawings on it.) So this past weekend we had a party. About 40 people, lots of good food--we do pot luck here, we may have an oven now, that doesn't mean I know how to use it--great music and interesting conversation. We even got lucky on the weather. It rained all morning, but quit about 1 p.m. and didn't rain again until just before dark. Long after people stopped getting in the pool.

So, how's this related to remodeling, you might ask? Well, it's one of the things to keep in mind when you're buying a house or remodeling one. What do you plan to do in your house? We don't have kids, which might mean we could get by with a small house. But, the truth is, we both work out of the house, we have a lot of company, and now that we have a place to do it, we like to have parties.

Before the remodeling began, this wasn't a good house for parties. It had potential, that's why we bought it, but the inside was chopped up, dreary and dark. The outside was great, two acres and a pool. Except that the deck, on the west side of the house, had been painted dark brown to match the house. In the afternoons, you couldn't walk barefoot across the deck to get to the pool without setting the bottoms of your feet on fire. And there was nowhere to sit out back that didn't just bake in the hot Georgia sun all afternoon.

Thanks to the resident remodeling contractor, we now have a screen porch out back and the remaining deck is painted light gray. We can sit in fan-blown comfort while watching others swim in the pool or even stay outside if it's raining. It's great to listen to the rain bounce off the metal roof of the porch. And you can walk across the deck without your toes bursting into flames.

And when the walls came tumbling down on the inside, the whole house opened up. We can have 50 people inside, almost comfortably. So long as not everybody wants to sit down at the same time!

Look for some pictures with the next few posts.

I'll get some pictures up of the

So, we got this thing ...

2007-07-19T00:36:00.000-04:00

My mother-in-law called recently and asked Chris if he'd travel to west Alabama to pick up a family heirloom--for lack of a better word--that one of her cousins has had custody of for years. The cousin's moving and doesn't have room for it in the new house. And it needs to stay in the family, Chris's mother said.

That's how we became the proud, but concerned, owners of something that may or may not be illegal to own. I don't know.

When Chris was very young (back in the late 1960s) his family traveled from Alabama to the Petrified Forest in Arizona. And brought back a 600-pound souvenir in the form of a petrified log. Said log is probably a couple of feet long and a foot or so in diameter. As I was trying to find room for the dog--a Pomeranian, for heaven's sake, not a Great Dane or anything--in the back of the Exploder (I mean Explorer) I thought I'd just slide the log over a couple of inches to make room for Princess Prissy Pants. But I couldn't budge the thing.

Now, the story they tell is that in the late '60s it was perfectly legal to bring home a petrified log. Not so much, now, according to the website, which talks about stiff penalties--I'm imagining floggings or tar and feathers--for so much as touching the petrified wood, much less picking it up and taking it home.

So, what's a basically law-abiding girl supposed to do? It's not like we can ship the thing back (600 pounds, remember?).

For now, it looks good in the living room. Maybe one day we'll make our own pilgrimmage to the Petrified Forest and return the heirloom back to its homeland under cover of darkness. But, please, don't tell my mother-in-law.

A squirrel in the house!

2007-06-14T11:36:00.000-04:00

Pets add so much joy to your life! Especially when you have a dog door. It is the portal through which all manner of surprises can come enter one's life.

We have a very large Pomeranian, as Pomeranians go, the 10-pound Princess Prissy Pants, who is quite as prissy as her name implies. But don't let that sleek, elegant, black (with coy touches of white on her chin and legs) fool you. She's a hunter.

We don't always leave the dog door open. We also have a cat who brought in a live, tail-less chipmunk (The tail was on the floor by the refridgerator; obviously Kitty was saving it for a snack later.), a dead mole and a dead baby bird one day when Chris was out of town. But that's another story. But because of Kitty, we only leave the dog door open when we have visiting dogs because Kitty is a scaredy-cat and won't come out when Leroy, my parent's killer shitz tzu, is visiting.

So, there I sat at my desk, writing a magazine article, when my precious little Prissy Pants brought me a gift--a headless squirrel--and laid it at my feet. She was quite proud of herself. I was less thrilled. In fact, I was disugusted. Fortunately Chris was home (and our marriage vows state that he is to deal with all dead things, and he owes me big after the Kitty episode, so I ran outside, stood on the table on the deck and screeched until he cleaned up the mess). My first question was, "How do we get rid of the dog door?"

After Prissy Pants had thrown up squirrel parts on the new couch and on the bed, my question became, "How do we get rid of the dog?"

The answer is, "We don't." Both the dog and the dog door, along with the killer Leroy and cousin Abby the Norwich Terrier, are still here. It's a small-dog convention at our house this week. Kitty has packed her bags and would run away from home if she had nerve enough to leave the master bathroom.

So, I guess the dog door will stay, at least until we get the other projects--front steps (we've only had one friend sprain an ankle by jumping off the porch and landing in a hole); master bathroom doors, which would make Kitty happy; flooring in the chicken room; redoing the extra bathroom (the pipes burst several years ago, so it's been unusable since then) and a mess of other things I don't even want to think about.

You can either do the work or write about it!

2007-05-29T17:54:00.000-04:00

All that's left of the chicken room, our room above the detached garage where Chris once raised chickens on the shag carpet, is a picture drawn on the floor in black Sharpie that says "Welcome: The Chicken Room." All wildlife, except my husband, has been evicted. The wall is repaired where the bees lived for a couple of years. No signs of the chickens remain, thank goodness!

The room is supposed to be my husband's office. He's a remodeling contractor. But you see the pictures. It's every little boys dream office with musical instruments and musicians, (Chris is playing the drums) a couch, and a floor that nobody cares about. (We'll get floor covering one day, but given that it took seven years from the time the carpet came up in the main part of the house until the new flooring went down, I'm not holding my breath.) I'm afraid to ask how much work he's getting done up there. He moved his desk in last week. Then this weekend we moved a couple of bookcases and all of his office stuff upstairs. I may never see him again.

We both work out of the house. After nine months, I have given birth to my own office. I don't have to work at the dining room table, our only eating space, clearing it off every time we have company, which is often. No, life is good. I'm in an office of my own, the red room, formerly the box room, when it had no heat or air and French doors hung so crooked you could throw a cat through the cracks in between them. Before that, it was a garage. Now it's an office/den/dog room/piano studio. But with Chris installed in the chicken room, it's all mine! The great American novel should be finished any time now!

Overlooked Miami Beach architecture

2007-04-28T10:09:00.000-04:00

Okay, so maybe calling the Miami Beach lifeguard huts architecture is a bit of a stretch, but I loved them! Given my inclination to move all things beachy into our suburban ranch house, I'm trying to figure out where to put one of these things. By the pool is probably the best spot. We could use it to store all of the pool junk--nets, vacuum, chemicals, floats, etc. But it can't be too close or some of the adreneline junkies who use the pool will be diving off the platform, and the deep end's just not deep enough for that!

The Art Deco architecture was fun to see, too. But everybody talks/writes about that, leaving those cute little beach huts feeling completely ignored. I've included photos of my three favorites.

I was in Miami Beach for Sleuthfest, a mystery writers conference sponsored by the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. I've written a mystery, Redneck Tarot, and was at the conference to pitch to agents and editors. I have one of each who would like to read the manuscript, which Ii will have in the mail Monday. We'll see what happens.

But even if this agent and editor don't come through for me, the trip was worth it--just to see the lifeguard huts!

The swarm moves on

2007-04-15T10:41:00.000-04:00

This was the week of biology lessons in our chicken room. That room as been home to lots of wildlife, from the human to the non-human variety. First the chickens lived there. Then a hive of bees moved into the walls. This week we finally got the bees removed--and discovered the walls had become home to carpenter ants and these disgusting beetles that look like ticks, except when they're in the larval stage and look like maggots--blech!

Thanks to Georgetown House who provided a tip about finding someone to take our bees alive! Chris, my husband, found Cindy Bee, a woman who has been ridding homes of bees for 11 years! She came out on Thursday and took ours away--and let me watch, take pictures and learn about the process. She doesn't need to worry that I'm planning to horn in on her business. It looks scary as hell!

The first photo shows the outside wall of the chicken room. This is all we could see of the bee hive until Cindy exposed it all. We could occasionally see the swarm of bees surrounding the hole--that's how we knew what had done the damage. That's honey dripping down the wall. We could also feel a hot spot created by the movement of the bees on the inside wall.

Anyway, Cindy donned her protective gear--net bee hat, long sleeves, gloves, etc. And headed inside. She said she'd come get me when it was safe to come in--she didn't recommend being there when she cut the hole through the drywall. That part tends to upset the bees, and nobody wants to be around upset bees! Especially when they don't have a net bee hat!

In a little while she came and got me. She had cut a hole about 1 foot wide and 3 feet long--it fit just between the studs in the wall, where the morons who built the garage and chicken room had forgotten or neglected or thought they were playing some great joke or maybe they just wanted to one day have bees living in the wall, anyway, they didn't put any insulation--which Cindy says bees hate--in between that one pair of studs. (See the second photo, all that black is very agitated bees.)

Cindy seemed a little disappointed by the hive. It was black, which indicates old comb, with no white new comb around it at all. This means an unhealthy hive. Because our hive was unhealthy, she estimated we only had 10,000-12,000 bees! Which sounded like a right healthy number of bees to me. But, if the hive had been healthy, we'd have had 30,000-40,000 bees! Who knows, they might have completely destroyed the chicken room! So, I was happy with 10,000-12,000!

I took pictures, looked at the bees, got to wear the bee hat--not a good look for me. Then she suggested I go away again while she vacuumed them up. She uses an actual vacuum cleaner, but sucks the bees into a five-gallon paint bucket instead of into the cleaner bag. I heard the vacuum cleaner running for quite a while. Then it stopped. A while later she came to get me again.

She had cut the comb loose from the wall and wanted to show me what she found. She had been afraid there would be no queen, given how unhealthy the whole mess looked, but she found bee eggs in some of the comb. Just looked to me like dirt pressed into the holes in the comb, but she said there were eggs in there. And since she seemed to know what she was talking about, I believed her. So, if there were eggs, there had to be a queen. But she couldn't find it. Then she showed me another piece of comb that had bright yellow in the holes--pollen! Finally, I got to see the real purpose for all that yellow crap that covers our world here in north Atlanta for a month in the spring. (Picture 3 shows Cindy Bee and the baby bees--that's the "beach house" in the background. The chicken room is over the detached garage.)

She also pointed out the problem that the bees were fighting--the disgusting tick-like beetles. A whole pile of white maggoty-looking things crawled around the comb and a couple of little black beetles could be seen. They're parasites, living off the bees. She said usually the bees can take 'em, but we seemed to have a docile, hospitable swarm and they'd welcomed the beetles in. Beetles, being beetles, promptly took over. Then she told me the beetles were the worst problem. We went back inside and looked at the wall where she had cut the comb away. Little teeny holes showed through the siding, letting in pinpricks of light. "Carpenter ants," Cindy said. They're eating the chicken room.

So, 3 and a half hours and several hundred dollars later, we no longer have bees (Cindy even found the queen, crawling around on the floor, which she said they never do. I figure the queen got sick of the carpenter ants or the baby bees always wanting something from her.) Now we have carpenter ants and a hole in the newly finished drywall. ("She'll get the bees out through the siding," Chris said, as we hung, taped, mudded and sanded new drywall just two weeks ago.)

But, really, what kind of remodelers would we be if one project didn't begat several others? Better get back to work!

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz ...

2007-03-28T15:00:00.000-04:00

Honey bees have been living in the wall of our garage for several years now. They go dormant or hibernate or something in the winter, but spring has sprung in Georgia and they are back. One day--after the yellow-pollen haze is gone and I can safely leave the house--I'll take a picture of them to post. They mostly live inside the wall, but they also come out and huddle close together looking like a big, black blob on the side of the garage.

So, they've been there several years. Chris has looked for a way to get rid of them without killing them--he's a nice guy, rescued a neighbor's dog that had fallen in another neighbor's pond at 1:30 yesterday morning and couldn't get out. But he's having a hard time finding one, that doesn't cost an arm and a bee wing! He's also cheap, so when the humanitarian side and the cheap side conflict, he just does nothing. And the bees haven't really been a problem.

It's kind of cool to see them hanging out on the side of the garage. And if you press your hand on the wall inside, it feels warm--these activities are good for briefly amusing the nephews when they come to visit.

But yesterday the bees became a problem. We're fixing up the room over the garage to bee (pun intended) Chris' office. Some structural work to keep the roof from collapsing on him while he sits at his desk, running his empire, required the replacement of the drywall on the vaulted ceiling. When the drywall came down off the ceiling beside the wall where the bees live, they were able to get inside the garage for the first time. They came in through the little crack between the roof rafters and the drywall on the wall.

Needless to say no one wanted to try to hang drywall with bees swarming around! Enter Great Stuff! That very cool stuff, that is almost as versatile as Duct Tape. Chris sprayed it in the crack to keep more bees from coming into the room, then left the room for a while. The bees all disappeared--going back to their hive in the wall.

We might decide to keep them if we could figure out how to get the honey out of the wall--but fresh honey mixed with insulation doesn't sound like something you want to smear on a biscuit!

So if anyone has any ideas for how to humanely and cheaply get rid of bees, please, let us know!

Avoiding 7 years of bad luck!

2007-03-23T12:17:00.000-04:00

When we bought our house, which looked nothing like a beach house 13 years ago, we decided that the woman who sold it to us had a strong streak of vanity in her. The house was full of mirrors. Full-length mirrors hung on backs of all the closet doors, every one in the whole house. Another full-length, double-wide mirror hung on the master bedroom wall, despite the one on the master closet door. And in the room above the detached garage, an 8-foot square mirror stretched from floor to ceiling and covered the space between two windows on one wall. She obviously didn't want to have to go more than 10 steps anywhere in the house without being able to see her reflection.

We got rid of most of the other mirrors as we painted or moved closet doors. But we left the huge one. The tenants we had up there when we first moved into the house didn't seem to mind it. One was so stoned all the time he probably didn't notice it. After he left, we used the room for storage, then as a chicken house, then most recently as a workout room--with storage. It was nice to have the mirror when we (mostly Chris) worked out. Besides, what were we going to do with an 8-foot square mirror, that wouldn't risk breaking it and causing a lifetime of bad luck?

Now we're getting the room ready to be Chris's office--he works at home as a remodeling contractor and building. And we needed the wall space where the mirror was for furniture. And we thought it seemed weird for Chris to be staring at himself all day as he worked. Despite the fact that he's quite handsome!

So he had a brainstorm. He called a glass company he works with--they do shower doors, replacement glass for windows, normal-sized mirrors--and they came and got it--for free! They took it off the wall and carted it away, without breaking it and causing anyone to have bad luck!

I'm sure it's a sign. It means the rest of the work on the room will go smoothly--despite the fact that we've been waiting on the drywall guys for two days--and they still aren't here.

The Taxman cometh

2007-02-21T12:19:00.000-05:00

So last year we made a little more money than in previous years. Which seems like a great thing, right? Now we can finish the chicken room into an office and I can stop having to write on the kitchen table (the only place to eat in our house).

Except that the taxman is going to take all of the money we had budgeted for said chicken room. I knew we were making more money last year and thought I had sent enough in estimated payments to cover the difference. But since math is not what I do well. And, really, all I did was say to myself, "Oh, I think I'll send in a little more money this time. This should be plenty." Rather than try to find out exactly how much I should send in, like, if there's a formula or something, which apparently there is. So, now we have to pay, and I have to keep writing on the kitchen table, carting my work life around in a red plastic basket that threatens to break and spill out all of my work everytime I pick it up.

And I can forget updating the hall bath. It was the first thing we did in our house thirteen years ago when we bought. It was disgusting and dirt and dark brown. And I found this very cool Elvis shower curtain--a life-sized picture of Elvis is full hip swivel. Elvis inspired the whole decor. The walls are painted black and white stripes and covered with Elvis photos and memorabilia. The only rule was Elvis had to stay in the bathroom. You know how people get when they think you collect something--you end up with Elvis creeping out into the living space. We decided early on that this house wasn't big enough for Chris, me and Elvis.

We've all been happy with him living in the bathroom for all these years. But the shower curtain has holes and the white stripes on the walls have yellowed and the vanity needs to be replaced.

But it all has to wait. Because if we don't pay the taxman, we'll be singing our own version of Jailhouse Rock. Nobody wants to hear that!

What could possibly top this?

2007-02-08T15:00:00.000-05:00

Our new roof is on! The roofers were here most of last week, including one really, really cold day (for Georgia) anyway, when the very steep front half of the roof was slick with ice. Fortunately they didn't tell me that until the next day, when it was warmer and not slick at all. I'd have told them to go home had I known.

Of course, the problem with getting work done is that it begats other work that needs to be done. Now, for example, we need to paint the new siding around the dormers--see photo. So, do we just paint that the same color as the rest of the house or do we figure out what color we want to change the house to--it's been this gray color for quite a long time and could use a paint job. And if we do decide to repaint, then do we get the rest of the work finished on the outside first? For example, we've never put in front steps. You have to leap over a good-sized crevice at the end of the driveway or else step up an impossibly tall three feet to reach our front porch. We keep meaning to build steps, but it hasn't happened yet. And what about the siding on the chimney? It was rotten. The rotten parts got removed, but the new siding is only about half finished--and has been that way since the fall. And on and on and on.

But, meanwhile, I'm thrilled with the roof. The next step (because I know how things work around here and the siding won't get painted at all for ages) is the drywall inside, then paint, floorcovering and moving Chris in to his new office--and me off the kitchen table!

I'd rather that happen than the siding anyway.

The Roofers are Here!

2007-01-30T09:09:00.000-05:00

Nine years ago--I can remember it so specifically because it was the same summer we had my dad's 60th birthday party here--we put a green standing-seam metal roof on our house. It's been great! It looks good, it isn't too loud when it storms--lots of insulation in the attic--but if you want the noise of rain on a metal roof, we have a screened porch. Just don't go out in a hail storm, you'll go deaf.

Anyway, we also have this detached garage and for reasons I'm not sure of now--probably lack of money--we didn't reroof the garage when we did the house. So for 9 years it's had the old brown shingles. Well, two years ago it started to leak pretty badly, water running down the back wall everytime it rained.

We started talking seriously about getting the roof then. But Chris put up a blue tarp--which looks really good with the brown roof, gray-sided garage and green-roofed house--and that was as far as we got. (Chris has completion issues--only around here, not when he's remodeling other people's houses. I think he's afraid I'll either come up with another project or decide I'm ready to move if he actually finishes something. This way, he knows a move is at least six months in the future, because no one would buy the place with its half-finished projects.)

Until today--the roofers were going to come yesterday, but we woke up to 19-degree weather. Damn cold for Georgia. So they put it off for a warmer day--it's 36 degrees now. I can see the roofers from my desk (which is actually the dining room table). And I'm afraid I won't get much work done today. I'll be too busy looking out the window at the progress. Right now they are scraping shingles off, exposing the wood underneath. They're moving pretty fast, much faster than I would on the fairly steeply pitched roof.

The sun's shining on them, so I don't think they'll freeze, but 36 degrees is still damn cold for Georgia. I'm awfully glad they're here!

Not so beachy furniture

2007-01-24T16:02:00.000-05:00

Well, we bought a new couch, chair & ottoman for the living room as our Christmas present this year. They just arrived and we love them. However, Chris says they aren't really very beachy, though the chair and ottoman are great for napping. You can see for yourself in the photos. When I look at our old furniture, though, all I see is old furniture. Not anything beachy either. It's more the whole atmosphere of the place, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, beachy or not, the furniture we replaced had to go. The off-white leather sectional sofa had been bought 12 years ago at a garage sale. It officially entered the "got-to-go" category when Prissy, our giant (10 pound) Pomeranian, puked a river from one end of it to the other last summer. I didn't know such a small dog could throw up so much. I discovered that cleaning leather with bleach cleaner, which seemed like such a good idea in the face of all that stuff, didn't really do it much good. The scratches were forever raised and turned a weird brown color.

The chair and ottoman that we replaced had been my parents, and I believe are actually older than I am. They've lived very productive lives as cat scratching posts, but it was time for their retirement as well. But we're not really crying over dead furniture. It's just being retired to the chicken room/office as soon as it's complete.

And progress is being made. The electrical work was done yesterday. And in huge news, the roof, green metal to match the house--after only 9 years--was delivered today! Whoo-hoo!

New Year's Resolutions--old song, new verse

2007-01-10T12:58:00.000-05:00

Once again I have resolved to get and stay more organized. And if only we would stop bringing so much crap into the house, it wouldn't be that hard. We don't have kids--only a small dog and smaller cat, and, really, they don't require much in the way of possessions, the ocassional bone and fishing-rod-feather toy, but that's it. So, it's Chris and me.

But this holiday we brought home a piano. It was my piano as a kid--I was the one who took lessons--and my parents have been trying to get us to take it for, like, three years. But everytime we'd go to Alabama it would be raining or we couldn't get anybody to help load it or we just didn't want to deal with it. But this last trip, the weather was good, we took the trailer and we found help.

Now, bringing home a piano isn't like bringing home another shirt. You can't just fold it up and put it in a drawer or hand it in the closet with the other shirts. No, it requires a lot of space. Space that we don't really have, but especially don't have at Christmas when we have a tree and Christmas stuff everywhere. So, for two weeks now the piano has been sitting right in front of the front door. We're getting ready for it.

The tree and other decorations are back in the attic--in an organized pile for the first time ever. But the moves required to find a home for this piano require a flow chart.

First, the small table in the foyer had to be moved--and we don't have a good place for it, so it's shoved in a corner of our bedroom, which when we got the new bed and dresser (for free from one of Chris's customers!) last year we swore we would stop doing, but that was before the piano.

Into the small table's place went the larger, but still small, colorful bookcase. It looks good there, actually. Better than where it was.

Into the small bookcase's place went the large cherry bookcase--sort of Shaker style, Chris made it several years back. It's okay in its new spot, a little dark, maybe, but the living room in the beach house is very bright.

And that's where we got bogged down. The china cabinet--an antique from Chris's mother, has to be moved next into the cherry bookcase spot--but, it's full of some not very attractive stuff, a light fixture, mismatched plates and some extremely tarnished silver (plate, not sterling!). And it's being moved to the living room, because the house doesn't really have a dining room--just a great room, which sounded like a great (get it) idea at the time, and is, but has left us without many walls against which to back up furniture.

Once the china cabinet goes, the piano will live in its place, in what is called the red room (used to be the box room, when we first moved in and discovered that the previous owners had finished the garage, but neglected to put in heat and air or insulation and the room, while finished, though in a ghastly manner with gold shag carpeting, French doors hung so crookedly you could throw a cat (especially ours, she's really small) through the cracks between them and a bizarre navy blue and dirt-color paint job, but that's another story). The red room is our office, den, music room, laundry, exercise room, etc. Since it already houses the drum set and various guitars, basses, amps and a glockenspiel, seems like the natural location for the piano.

At this point, as long as it leaves the front door area, I don't really care where it goes! Because until this series of moves is complete, getting organized is once again falling by the wayside.

Happy New Year!

2007-01-05T10:52:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been too long since the last post--I blame some on being too busy during the holidays and some on a lack of work in the chicken room. But, part of being busy included getting some work done!

The new beam and posts are up--which means the ceiling and roof won't fall down on anyone--a good thing by any standard. Also, the new closet has been framed up.

After much discussion, we've decided against a tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling. (Chris, who is not as in love with the beach as I am, has declared he wants a "lodge" theme for the chicken room--I swear, I'm trying to stop calling it that, but old habits die hard!)

The frugal part of Chris, always in competition with the "what do I want" part, won this fight and we're going with drywall for now. It will still be pricey--it's a vaulted ceiling, with several nooks and crannies due to dormer windows, the new beam and a weird little flat space in the center. But, cheaper than wood.

He's still trying to figure out exactly what a lodge look involves, but I'm guessing darker paint than I would choose and some sort of brown or green carpet. I hope it ends up being cozy, despite the lack of a fireplace or budget for new furniture. Considering it has to hold his office stuff--desk, files, etc.--plus a set of drums--we don't play, but he got them in a trade when he did some work for some folks whose teenage son decided he didn't want to be a drummer after all and we have several friends who play--plus weights, guitars and amps, a bass--and amp (he does play those), and cast-off sofa, chair and ottoman--I think cozy is definitely what it will be.

The roofing guy is supposed to come look at the roof today. We put a green metal roof on the main part of the house nearly nine years ago now, but we never got around to the garage. When the garage roof started leaking a couple of years ago it began to seem more urgent, but urgent is a relative term around here. A pretty blue tarp has kept the rain out--mostly, since then. We'll see how it works today--it's storming in north Atlanta.

And it's Friday. The roofing guy may not show up.

I'll keep you posted!

"The kitchen's looking good ...

2006-11-12T11:46:00.000-05:00

...okay, better."

That's a direct quote from Chris, who has been working out in the garage (top photo) this weekend trying to make it into an office.

Let me give you a little background. The detached building has a large room upstairs and a small kitchen and bath downstairs, next to the two-car garage.

When we first moved into the house and were really broke, we rented the apartment out. But when we had to evict our last tenant, a 55-year-old man who spent all his money on the dope he smoked in our backyard and so, couldn't afford the rent, we gave up on tenants out back.

Since then, the upstairs (bottom photo) has been used has a chicken coop--a digusting use for a room with shag carpet--storage and a workout room. The downstairs kitchen and bath haven't been available for their original purposes in years, since the pipes froze and water flooded the rooms. The broken pipes are behind the fiberglass shower stall. Their repair just hasn't made it to the top of the list. So, the downstairs became the paint storage department. (Chris is a remodeling contractor and can't bear to throw ANYTHING away.)

Meanwhile, we're now both working out of our house and want to move him to the upstairs room. (I call it the chicken or chicken #*&% room, due to it's previous life. Chris tries to call it the carriage house, but given its poor condition, he then generally has to explain what room he means.)

I've attached a couple of photos to give you an idea of the challenges we face! That is a crack you see along the ridge in the ceiling. The morons who built this place didn't use enough beam to carry the load. We try not to think about the roof caving in on us, though it could happen. Once the mess is cleaned out, the structural rebuilding can begin.