One Million Bones

 

This is happening, November 12, UNCC campus. 

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Exercise from Magical Words Blog

Ok, so I've decided this is never actually going to get done, so I'm posting it now as an unfinished...thing.  Enjoy.

Magical Words is an excellent writing blog which I skim fairly often.  This post showed up a couple days ago (probably more by the time you read this***) and I thought it was an interesting idea.  I have started the fall semester and this week has been a bit busy, so doing the exercise could also be a good way for me to remember to write instead of just freaking out about school.  Prompts are also a good thing for me.  For some reason I tend to be much more creative when I have a jumping off point rather than starting from scratch (a trait that has served me well in academics, but something that I find worrisome when thinking about the future).

Here's the basic idea from Magical Words' Catie Murphy: 

Here’s the rule: first, before you go any further in reading this entry, right-click on “leave a comment/# of comments” and open it in a new tab or window. This is really important for this exercise. The entire point here is that you should absolutely *not* read what other people have written until you’ve done yours. Please, please follow this rule.

I am going to present you with an extremely generic story point. I want you to rewrite the material I have provided the way *you* would tell it, and then keep going for a little while. Five or ten minutes, a couple hundred words, something like that. No more; this isn’t a long writing assignment.
Post your retelling of the story. Then, and only then, may you read what other people have written. Again, I ask you to please, please follow these rules, because doing otherwise will defeat the point.
Here’s your story:

Robin ran up the stairs in the tower to the locked door. A wooden bird was beside it. Robin’s heart pounded, chest tight with needing air. Robin poured water on the bird’s head and it sang, making the door open. On the door’s other side was a beautiful princess.

I won't be commenting on the actual post on Magical Words, because to the best of my memory I don't have a WordPress account and I don't want to mess with registering (you can't post a comment unless you have).  But, here is my version of the exercise:
     

               The tower was swaying with the weight of so many birds.  Robin would never have guessed that creatures as small as her animal namesake could shake a structure made of stone, but it wasn't their mere physical burden that disturbed the balance of each stone on stone beneath; it was that the enclosed air in the narrow neck of the tower had begun to slosh with their chaotic, ever-present movement, like water in a tidal pool.  Arms upraised in instinctual terror of losing her eyesight, Robin leaned against the wall and began crawling up the stairs, resting on the balls of her feet and bracing her shins on the step above.  cracks and fissures in the walls joined the intentional gashing slits of archery windows to stab the dusty, seething air with blades of light.  Twice before she reached the cracked wooden door at the top of the stairs Robin was dashed by a maddened bird, and each time she nearly fell, each collision left her with fresh blood - on her scalp, in her hair, across her cheek.  Finally reaching the door was as unexpected as a No Trespassing sign in a dream where running is eternal and the monsters behind are only ever just out of sight.
                 A nook in the wall beside the door was just above Robin's head.  Slowly, pressing her hands against the door without minding the splinters that caught and dragged and came away in her skin, Robin unfolded.  The nook was shaped like a fancy window, with a horizontal bottom that Robin could see now was actually some kind of well with water rippling strangely, and sides that were vertical for about a foot and then tapered sharply to a point six inches above that.  At the point where the taper began, there was a shelf, and on that shelf sat a wooden bird.  It was so plain it might just have been a lump of wood, but Robin knew better. 
                 The sudden, hot prickle swept across Robin's upper back, and she twitched spasmodically.
                 Water trickled in the fountain, but was voiceless in the vortex of swishing wings.  Or maybe the two sounds were so similar that they just bled into each other.  The thought of touching that dark, swirling mass made Robin's stomach clench, and she couldn't say why.  When she finally dipped her fingers in, breathing so fast and so shallow her vision was beginning to spot, the water was sickeningly warm - why had she thought it would be cold?  She dribbled the clinging droplets over the wooden bird's back and head.
                    It wasn't that the bird moved, or even became more lifelike, but suddenly new shadows appeared, outlining curves and depressions in the wood that described the essence of life; maybe it was just that it was more like the way a tree is alive, instead of the way birds and other animals live.  The maelstrom behind her cut off jaggedly.  Robin, desperate not to turn around and look, sent every muscle rigid.
                    And then the wooden bird sang.

***See follow-up post here - have I really messed around with this for two whole weeks??  I need to get going so I can go read the other entries.

Green Tomatoes of September

This last week.  It's unbelievable.  The switch on the weather has been flipped.  From scorching sauna to light and crispy fall.  Man, I gotta figure out where that switch is.

So.  Tomatoes.  As I've mentioned before, I haven't done much gardening this year, but PapaBear put in three tomato plants and one pepper plant.  One bush was a hybrid yellow variety, which was the first time I'd had a yellow.  The fruit it produced it were delicious, but it didn't bear all that many.  The other two bushes were cherry and plum varieties, and they were a little more active, but the squash bugs from the spring of 2010, still in residence, apparently, seem just as happy to murnch on tomatoes as on precious, white Italian heirloom zucchini.  Not that I'm bitter or anything.  The pepper plant hasn't done much of anything.

All in all, it could have been a better tomato year, but you get out what you put in, so meh.  But now it's about time for those tomato plants to come out, and there was maybe a medium sized bowl of unmolested green tomatoes.  Not that I bothered to find that out before coming across this post on A Way to Garden.  Following the hyperlink rabbit trail, we find this recipe for canning green tomatoes, and this recipe for roasted green tomatoes, which I'll be making later today.

This youtube video is where I first learned the waterbath canning technique...only, in my kitchen it's a little more low-tech. Think big casserole pot and matching steamer basket and a bigass spatula.

 

Speaking of A Way to Garden, it was the day after I saw this post about hornworms that I found this critter in our own garden.  Here's your gross-out nature moment of the day.  This, I believe, is a tobacco hornworm, just like the one from Margaret Roach's garden.  It has been made into a meatsack by a parasitic wasp, who planted her larvae on its back.

 



Looking at my post list, I see that I've really been focusing on the garden a lot.  That will change if I have time to do some blogging in the next week; there's a creative writing exercise from a blog I read that I've been messing around with for the last three weeks, and I hope to get that up soon.  I also want to do a post on some of the reading material for one of my classes this semester.  It's a topics class on war and genocide as represented in children's literature (I know @_@), but it's really interesting, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts about it.  (As if I won't be doing plenty of writing for that class already.)

But before I go, lemme show you what I done!
 <--These will be the roasted tomatoes and below are my dilled green tomatoes all canned up so pretty!

 

I Bring to You an Announcement...

...of EARTHSHATTERING effect.

Well ok maybe not - but it's pretty freakin' awesome.

Amazon and Audible have just announced whispersync for voice.  You don't need an Audible account; you can use your Amazon if you have one - and let's face it if you don't you're not really living in the 21st century.  Your soul might be intact, but, really, as I sit here totally geeking out, who am I to judge?

And make no mistake, if you haven't picked up on the fact already, I am TOTALLY geeking out.  On the list of books available for whispersync, there are a whole bunch of free (FREE!  It rhymes with spree!) classics.  Which means you get the book.  And the audiobook.  And the two versions keep track of your locations so that you can switch off between them.  For free.  Did I mention it was FREE?

There's also a list that, sadly, is not free, but still, you can't have everything.

From what I can tell, whispersync should work with the desktop reading app that Amazon provides (also free).  I also noticed a new cloud reader that openss up directly in the browser - although only select browsers are supported.  (Not something I have to worry about because I have a Kindle Fire *ridiculously self satisfied smile*)

So go, my Imaginaries, go, and feel the love.

Weedy Wednesday: Mare's Tail

...also known as horse tail, also known as horseweed.  Being the feminist that I am, I shall say "Mare's tail."

         I periodically (as with everything I do) become obsessed with weed identification.  Through repeatedly letting my garden get wildly out of hand and then going in and pulling everything up by hand I've become closely acquainted with a few of the (in my opinion) more pernicious weeds, such as spurge, crabgrass, brambles, and the invasive-but-at-least-it-has-a-pretty-flower knotweed.  But weed ID is even more satisfying and fun when I'm out and about and can look at plants by the roadside and know what they are. 
        
          For Weedy Wednesday (look, I already told you I'm a sucker for alliteration, ok?), I'm going to do a series on weed identification, focusing on one weed each essay.  I will post the official source of identification (usually from what seem to be state university student projects, although some information comes from the NC Extension Office), where you can see their pictures of the plant, information from those sources, and my own personal pictures as documentation.  Often times there are several closely resembling varieties and what I hope to accomplish is that by posting pictures of the actual plant I'm looking at, any random imaginary passerby (yes, I'm looking at you - goshdarnit, I need a poster) can help decide whether or not I've correctly identified the weed.

           I chose mares tail for my first Weedy Wednesday  because, one, its really, really common in my neck of the woods - it even showed up in my garden; if you go look at the before picture you can see it. And two, MamaBear asked about it and since I didn't recognise the adult plant, I was prompted to check the online sources that I mentioned earlier...which got me rooting around even deeper, looking for other plants I recognised in one stage or another, and well, one thing led to another and here we are.

           So, there are several source for mares tail.
           There's the NC State University TurfFiles (*snicker* I like that)
           Apparently mares tail is ubiquitous in more states than NC, since the University of California included it in their Integrated Pest Managemnt gallery
           And this...company (I don't know, and really couldn't care less, I just think they have a really good weed ID thingy) has a really good weed ID thingy that you can search by state.  It has an oh-so-fancy pop up function though, so to see mares tail you'll have to scroll down because I can't link directly to it.

           So, finally, Duh-tuh-duh-duh, we come to MY pictures!

 

There are several fallow roadside fields that are practically nothing but mare's tail.  The NC State blurb (it's really not very detailed, but what more can you say, I suppose?) informs us that the height of the plant depends on the soil in which it grows.  I think our local soil agrees with mare's tail tremendously.  The blurb also states that the plant produces copious seeds.  I think I got the specimens in my garden pulled up before they were done flowering, but if not, I hope my mulch stands up...