OF SHOES AND DEAD MICE

Wow! It's been quite a long time since I tapped out a new message, hasn't it? Many things going on these days.

I was going on an errand one day a while ago and had come to an intersection onto the main highway. Lying in the street was a white sneaker. A fairly new one, and small, perhaps a child about six or eight. I chuckled as I thought of the kid who liked to go barefoot nonchalantly tossing the sneaker out the car window as the car rolled to a stop and how the mom would probably tear up her house looking for it later that day or the next. Of course, if it had been my kid, it wouldn't have been so funny. Socks not returning from the washing machine were bad enough.

On my way home from my errand, coming to the intersection again from a completely different direction and on a different side road about a half mile south of the other side road, I saw another sneaker. White. Small. New. Now my writer's mind kicked into high gear. Possible scenarios: Mom put both sneakers on the roof of the car as she was hustling everybody off to soccer practice. Then forgot about them. Sneakers eventually fell off. Except--how did the second sneaker survive the turn? Or did the kid dangle the second sneaker by the shoelace for a while before letting go? Was this an abduction and someone was trying to leave a trail? Better than breadcrumbs, certainly. Weird.

Of such everyday events are stories made. Perhaps the errant sneakers will eventually find their way into a book or story. One never knows.

The worms are officially dead. Well, actually, a couple survived, but they went into the compost heap to see if they'd fare better with even more neglect.

And the mice are gone. All four of them. We caught three of them--one still alive, but doomed to spend the rest of his days hopping around with a tiny crutch, like Tiny Tim Cratchitt. The last mouse had spent the last four years attached to my computer. When it didn't move anymore, I suspected foul play, especially when I took it to the computer store and it worked fine there. The tech, however, suggested I might want to get a backup, just in case. Smart man. Back home, the mouse still wouldn't work, but the new one did. I'm glad I got it, too, because I just purchased a new laptop and will need one there.

Hope you're enjoying the trans-seasonal weather wherever you are!

Excuses, Excuses

Time is perhaps the biggest bugaboo for writers. I guess there are people who can say they're going to get up at 5 a.m., write for three hours, then breakfast on dry toast and organic orange juice, but then world peace is a possibility, too. The rest of us struggle each day, trying to find a few minutes to pursue the muse and much too often failing.

The problem is, we do it to ourselves. For someone who professes a love of writing, I can find more excuses than Carter's has liver pills, if they still do. (It's too early in the morning to think. Sometimes cliches do come in handy.) Anyway, when it's time to write, it also appears to be time to:

walk the dog (even though I don't have one, I figure I can make one up. I'm a writer, right?)
take a walk myself (and convince myself that my mind will be fresher when I come back)
do the dishes (which I normally feel is the sole job of whatever gadget GE has placed in my house)
play the guitar (once I dig it out from under the bed and dust it off)
run a load of wash
knit
shred old tax receipts
call somebody on the phone (even if it's to hear my bank balance on the automated teller)
and this latest,
check my worms.

I'm afraid you read that correctly. Worms.

Let me explain. For Christmas this year, I got a worm farming kit, complete with a thousand little wigglers. I won't go into all the rather gross details, but it's something I've been encouraged to try by several gardeners who claim my garden will be an earthly delight if I use castings from the worms. (I'm not sure yet what castings are. They could be worm poop or dead worms. Either way, they sound awful.) These gardeners also claim that worms are easy to take care of. Dump them into a bin with a bunch of wet, shredded newspaper and a bunch of garbage. (Oh, yeah? Then, why do people feel the need to write books about worm farming, huh? If it was that easy, wouldn't a pamphlet do?) Well, I shredded and dumped and have been down in the basement a few times to see what's happening. As far as I can see, nothing. The worms don't seem to be trying to crawl out, which is good--very good. They might be dead already, although I doubt that. I have to assume they're munching away, happy as clams, making good dirt. (Yes, even for cliches that's poor, but I said it's early.)

Now, my gardens have always been an experiment in experiments. My general approach has been to toss seeds in the direction of the ground and wait until something comes up. I also use compost and often get interesting products from last year's rinds, skins, and cores. Tomatoes are the ones that most often show up, although I've also had cantaloupes, pumpkins, and decorative gourds. So, I have to ask myself whether the worms are really going to make a big impact, or whether they're better used as an excuse for not writing.

I'll keep you posted. Right now, though, this blog seems to be fulfilling the need just as well as the worms.

Entropy Plaza

I got this term from my husband, Pat, who once built a small stone plaza around our flagpole. He's always been interested in fractals and the chaos theory. (That's possibly why he married me.) Anyway, the basic definition of entropy is as a measure of the disorder that exists in a system. In physics, it's a measure of the energy in a system or process that is unavailable to do work. (Wow! That is so me!) I got this from the Microsoft Word on-line dictionary. If you understand it, let me know.

So, how does this have any bearing on the stone plaza? Well, he started off placing the stones very neatly. Eventually, he realized everything wasn't going to fit perfectly in the space he had defined, so he finished the job a bit haphazardly, with stones going off in all directions. He dusted off his hands and declared it to be Entropy Plaza--from order into chaos.

And that kind of sums up the way I function.

I Started Life As A Cowboy

I didn't really start life as a cowboy, but I wanted to. I haunted movie houses and drank in every scene where Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or Hopalong Cassidy rode up mesas and down canyons to bring law and order to the Wild West. I owned my own pair of chaps. I loved horses. Still do, although I never learned to ride very well. I read every Zane Grey book I could get my hands on. I was, in general, the despair of my father who thought I was never going to grow up. I discovered that fact many years later, too late to show him that, in a way, I actually was living my dream of "catching the bad guys." Because isn't that what stories are all about? Bad guys don't have to be gunslingers. Bad guys are the conflicts in our lives--and conflict is at the heart of every story. Hopefully, my father knows I'm okay.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit New Mexico and Arizona. I felt as if I was finally home.