Party Book with Ideas for This Weekend
Bob and I don’t have any big plans for the weekend. Well, that’s not true. Bob plans to enjoy some Waterfront Blues Festival. I will enjoy staying home. I’ve gone before and it was super fun but my tolerance for crowds is dwindling by the second and with the excellent weather I’m sure it will be packed-o-rama down there.
We’re kicking off the weekend with a Portland Timbers game tomorrow.
More classics from the Party Book
What more can I add? I had to look up excelsior and turns out it’s something called “wood wool” or what you’d probably call packing material.
Here’s the biggest tomato
(My spellcheck wants to correct it to: write-a-ton. ha!)
Info about the Write-a-Thon here and Clarion West Writeathon Page.
My goal is 3000 words a week and 2 story submissions during the six weeks as in sending something finished to a market. Week one really ended yesterday and this is my progress as of then.
Word count: 3655
Stories submitted: 0 (not to panic, still lots of time)
If you still want to contribute, it’s not too late. My donation page is here or there’s an address to send checks at the URL above or you can contact me and I’ll help you out.
I have an incredibly busy week coming up and won’t make it home before 7pm except for the night I don’t make it home before 9pm.
I’m scanning some stuff from the party book for short posts. The whole book is so awesome, it’s tough to choose.
Klamath River looking downriver from Ishi Pishi Road.
I had this thing open on the desktop all day yesterday and couldn’t get it together to finish and post. I wasn’t in the mood to do anything yesterday. Even watch TV.
I woke up at 6am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Why do I always wake up at 6 on my day off? I got up and made a cup of tea and started to read and then my eyes felt a bit droopy. I woke up at 9am. Among the most brilliant naps of all time.
I finally dragged my butt out of bed and took care of a few errands. I made granola and watered the yard. I have a tomato bigger than a golf ball out there. Photo and endless nattering about it to follow.
Me and the fraidy cat reading Asimov’s. Shy Boy was a feral cat who is partly domesticated. Whenever I arrive he hides and runs away if he sees me. Until he randomly decides it’s safe to crawl in my lap and bug me.
My inbox is completely out of control. Everything in there is something I need to do and for every 5 I clear out, 5 new ones arrive. Actually the whole house seems like a bunch of things I need to do or problem solving activities.
Vandals hit the Panamnik Building. They broke a window in the post office and then tore this sign all apart. Dad thought he could fix it but they did a good job of destroying it. It was an exciting weekend. Someone got shot four times in the leg. “Oh, so it wasn’t an accident?” I said. Someone else drove off the road.
The trip to California was a big hit. We managed to do a little bit of everything. Thursday night falafel feed. Meredith and Aunt Janet made about 3000 falafels and there were plenty of leftovers. When the crew gets there in August there will be falafel for everyone.
Giant chestnut tree at Grandma’s place falls apart during a wind storm. Apparently it made a lot of noise when the limb, which is bigger than a lot of trees, came down.
Erin and I went down to Grandma’s place and took a long walk that included picking cherries. We filled our pockets.
Brush Dance
The brush dance starts at sundown and goes all night and the last dance is early in the morning. I went for a couple of hours when it started and then went back with Mom and Erin in the morning.
Old Timer’s Parade
After the dance we went back home to make Dad a father’s day breakfast and then we went to the Old Timer’s parade. I hate parades except for this one. And the Bigfoot parade in Willow Creek.
Bigfoot Parade from 2005
After the parade was the Old Timer’s picnic. All the fried chicken, deviled eggs and potato salad you can eat. Then there was a softball game.
Excellent trip.
The beautiful Sinead in her dance dress. Those girls dance all night in that heavy dress.
We’ve just returned from the farmer’s market. The weather is perfect plus there’s some sort of festival going on at the park so there were millions of people, strollers and dogs and I had enough rather quickly.
I’m trying to get organized here. It seems like everything I try to do involves something that is broken, lost or not working right. I had two simple projects. One involved two nails and one involved two screws and those took about an hour and I made a ding in the wall. Oh well, I’m sure I have many other fine qualities.
Also today: catching up on my beg-a-thon goal. I’ll update that tomorrow.
Look at this stinker dog.
Party at MKWC. I called my Mom from Grants Pass and said I was on the way. She said there was a falafel feed and I said, I know, I read it on Facebook. The first person I saw when I went into the building said, “Are you Erin’s sister?” Then he was embarrassed like, “what was I thinking?” And I laughed and said, “Yes, I’m Erin’s sister.” Then I ran into Nancy and she said, “I knew you were coming, I read it on Facebook.”
* * *
I normally don’t comment on current events but WTF? Farrah and Michael Jackson? And while we were at happy hour the apparent hoax about Jeff Goldblum came in.
What the hell? I haven’t been an MJ fan for years but Off the Wall was a huge part of my life during high school. (Go Chargers gymnastics team!) I gotta download that puppy from itunes.
Awesome trip. Got back this afternoon and I’ve been unloading and cleaning up.
Hung out in the garden long enough to bring in the first wave of the raspberry crop.
I’m not sure if I’m going to make a pie or use them in a topping for ice cream.
I’m not sure what we’re doing dinner this week but I bet there will be peas.
We’re off to a dinner. More at some point in the future.
View downriver from the access road to Dolans Bar, Klamath River, Orleans, California
I’m on my way out town (as soon as I bathe, pack, make lunch, put away laundry, burn some CDs for the car, go to Trader Joes, the bank, Toyota, and Edelweiss German Deli) for a long weekend and I almost completely forgot to post about the Clarion West Writeathon that starts on Sunday.
I sent out a notice but if you didn’t get one and feel bad that no one asked you for money, here’s your big chance to sponsor me for a very good cause. And if you already donated: super huge thank you!
Last summer I attended the workshop. You can read all my adventures here.
The organization that puts on the workshop is Clarion West (non-profit – tons of people donate all kinds of time and energy to make this happen).
My goals for the 6 weeks are to write 3000 words a week and to submit two stories for publication. I’ve been a big fat chicken about submitting so two stories in six weeks might not sound like much but it’s a lot for me. Charlene challenged me to double the words but it’s summer dang it. I already work hard, I don’t want to spend all my spare summer moments hunched over the keyboard.
I’m asking for sponsorship during the event. I’m going to match donations for the first $200 so if I can get 20 people to sponsor me for $10 (only $10!) I will make my goal of donating $400. And I think I’m close.
If you’ve ever had a dream of donating money to nerds, this is your big chance. Here’s my donation page. If you want to avoid Paypal there are alternate instructions here and if you don’t like me there’s a huge long list of other writers you can sponsor. Any and all donations are welcome. Even $1. Seriously. This organization thrives on micro-donations. And if you have no money, then nice thoughts are perfectly acceptable.
I’ll post weekly reports on what I’ve been doing.
Huge thanks to everybody everywhere for everything. Have a good weekend.
Since I still haven’t managed to finish a book I thought I’d post a partial pile of some of the stuff I’ve read since January. That pile isn’t counting all my classmate’s stories and the stories I read online.
I’m going away this weekend and optimistically taking two books. (ha!)
We have this giant green bush in our front yard and today it was a giant vibrating house of bees. I tried to take a photo but it just looked like a big green bush so I tried this close up. Regular bees don’t scare me but I am absurdly terrified of wasps.
I’ve needed to put the cages on the tomatoes. I normally don’t wait this long. One of the plants is getting really bushy. But I was afraid to go into the shed where they are stored because of all the wasps.
I finally bought some sort of earth-destroying spray in a giant yellow can and I went out there early this morning and with trembling hands, shot a high-powered stream of poison foam onto their nest building project. Wow, there is a great opportunity for an inappropriate joke. I think I’m going to let it pass.
Then I screamed like a girl and ran away and went back a couple hours later to find their twitching bodies on the floor of the shed.
I got the cages out and mangled the beautiful tomato plants to get them stuffed in.
The smallest tomato is the one that was growing in the walls of water. The walls didn’t contribute much this year.
The greens part of the garden isn’t too impressive. Everything is either bolting or getting eaten by what my hippie gardening book calls maggots. I guess it’s going to happen to us all someday.
I did pick a boatload of peas today and served them with Prosciutto and pasta. And I put the cucumbers, round two out in the garden.
Every quarter Bob and a group of his colleagues have a party to celebrate the end of the quarter. This time it was at our house so on Friday I decided to go see Star Trek.
I was never a big Star Trek person although I did watch several seasons of The Next Generation and I could probably do a post about that if I can get myself up for it one of these days.
Since the moment the new Star Trek was announced I’ve been getting headaches from rolling my eyes. I couldn’t understand why this had to be remade. I read a lot of sci-fi nerd news online and I would ignore the Star Trek movie as much as I could.
A long time ago there was this movie called Pacific Heights. I’m going to tie this point back to Star Trek so stay with me. The movie stared Melanie Griffiths when she wasn’t nearly as annoying and Matthew Modine and they were a cute couple who rented an apartment to Michael Keaton who turned into the crazy psycho tenant from hell.
Michael Keaton played this role so effectively that I completely loathed him and transferred all my bad feelings about his character to him personally. No Michael Keaton movies for me.
But then a couple of years later, I finally got around to seeing Batman the 1989 version that stared Michael Keaton there’s probably a way I can tie all this endless rebooting of old ideas into new movies again and again in right here but I’m too lazy to do it and I forgave Michael Keaton. That poor tortured Batman needed a hug.
Returning to the more recent past, I was a huge Heroes fan for about one season and then I thought the show went to complete doodie. And I hated Sylar. I really hated Sylar and when I found out that Sylar was going to be Spock it just confirmed all the reasons why I thought the Star Trek movie was a terrible idea.
But, everyone kept saying the movie was good and here I was at the movies and so I picked Star Trek and I thought is was FREAKING AWESOME. And Spock was so adorable and tortured. I wanted to take him home and bake him cookies and read him a story.
I wasn’t sure about the movie at first. I’d be too ashamed to write a scene (inconsequential spoiler) where a pregnant woman is labor right at the exact time the space ship is being evacuated from an attack by a terrible badass. Seriously? But fifteen minutes later I was biting my nails and sitting at the edge of my seat thinking: I can’t wait to see it again. *And* Karl Urban!
On that note, I guess it’s time to wrap this up. I have a super busy week coming up with some long days and then on Thursday I am rolling out of town to California for a long Internet-free weekend. Posting may be light. We’ll see.
