The Buzzard on the Roof

Ye Gods!  Yesterday we took the family to the Fanieul Hall Marketplace in Boston and ate at the venerable Durgin Park.  Hadn't been there in donkey's years.  It was basically unchanged.  I had a lobster roll which came with lots of sides.  I must say the baked beans were way too sweet, and the corn bread kind of dry.  Cole slaw good.  Lobster excellent but a little scanty for the price tag.  Mussels in garlic broth yummy as was the creamed spinach.  Salad that came with the pasta was excellent.  Wine delightful.  So, altogether a good feed.

The most amazing thing about the meal was the buzzard (I am not making this up) on the roof of the old building across the street.  Yup!  Sitting right on top of Fanieul Hall Marketplace.  At first I thought it was a wild turkey, which would have been weird enough, but a buzzard.  He was definitely enjoying the sunshine, and I wasn't sure if this was a nest he/she sat on or not.  Way up high on the roof.  Of course neither the waitress or anyone else had noticed.  Sometimes you just open your eyes and see the damnest things that no one else does.  And no, I wasn't smoking those funny cigarettes.

On the writing front, no Derringer award for "Bad Trip," but a couple friends were nominated.  Querying Promiscuous Mode like crazy with a new kickass query.    Finally have my character in Reno for the denouement of In Flight.  Have to rewrite Festival Madness starting the book in Reno.  All roads lead to Reno.  Going to self-pub the East German book, because after 20 years, the premise has gone a bit stale.  I can wrap a story within a story for a bigger word count.  It's too good to lie fallow forever. Need to get going on a couple more short stories.

Writer's like to bad mouth James Patterson, but he's doing a lot of things right.  For one blogger's viewpoint, visit this link.
 http://1stturningpoint.com/?p=3638

Have to go cook some eggs to dye.  We're having a great vegetarian Easter with a dish of asparagus, farfalle, mascarpone and hazelnuts.  It rocks.   Tacos tonight, homemade of course with all the accoutrements.   

Bags and bags of nice veggie food scraps for the cows, whose pasture was flooded this week.  Nice day.  Lots to do.  Onward

Bad Trip

Years ago, I clipped a short article from the Boston Globe (?) or maybe AOL's news about an airline that put it's passengers up for the night in a crack house. Like most writers, I have an "idea" file.

Comes the time to write the short story. I found the clipping, and promptly lost it. Googled around and the story was gone, baby, gone.

I noodled around for a while and combined the airline's faux pas with a motel we stayed at in Oakland a few years back en route to Burning Man. Very scary place.

Characters? I thought about an old couple in this predicament, and settled instead on a young couple, just returning from his grandpa's funeral in Kansas. I always go back to Kansas, like some homing pigeon.

Writing the story I found another character, a pimp, since I already had his whore. And the crack house.

Do you have any idea how little a suburban housewife knows about these things? I mean, our idea of living dangerously is to go into Boston without dinner reservations.

Amazing what you can find on the Internet. Pimp walk, pimp culture, pimp clothes. I worked at a place once that had a relationship to a clothing outfit that catered to hip hop, so I thought maybe the pimp would wear something from them. He did. I started to like him. I liked everyone in the story. The young man is a help desk technician because I can never get very far away from technology. Or Kansas. In the blood is in the blood.

The story is coming out in a few weeks in the Level Best Anthology, Quarry. The name of the story is "Bad Trip." That was a no brainer, and of course it operates on a couple levels. I hope some of my readers will seek out a copy, because I'm in terrific company. Hank Philippi Ryan, Mike Wiecek, Vinnie O'Neil, Kate Flora and others. The Level Best anthologies are the best. And here's a little hint.

Short stories make wonderful treadmill reading. You get so caught up you don't even realize you're exercising. And one or two will get you through a whole routine. I get bored out of my mind of the treadmill, and reading short stories is a great solution.

The Bad Trip

Bad Trip is the name of my new short story, which I had hoped to finish and polish in time to send into Level Best Books, but it didn't happen, because home nursing care and hospital visits are not conducive to writing.

Bad Trip is based on a true story, and then the "what if" appears. I had to do research on:
1) sleazy Memphis motels, 2) crack houses, 3) what pimps wear, 4)how pimps talk, 5)cost of disposable diapers and formula, even large Snickers Bars, 6) what Crack Cocaine smells like, 7) how pimps treat their "girls."

I got so hungry in CVS (researching baby supply costs) that I bought a bag (no longer comes in a box) of Cracker Jacks. No trans fat, but they tasted like the always did (good). I'm all for childish pleasures.
Writing Bad Trip was lots of fun, actually, and I have more ideas for short stories. If I can't sell it after a year, I'll publish it on Amazon Shorts.

Is today when the grand prize winner of the Amazon novel contest is announced? I'll have to take a look. April 15 is a date that stays in my head, and not just for tax reasons. The tax situation this year is a train wreck. Can't seem to figure this financing of retirement out. There must be tax software that allows you to plan as you go. Maybe even Money or Quicken. Arrrgh. Hate counting beans, even my own.

Sunday at dinner, I had a mouthful of applesauce, and suddenly there was something hard in my mouth--like a piece of walnut, and can you believe it was my silver crown with part of the tooth attached. Just fell off. Talk about freaking out! Fortunately, there is no pain involved, just a really weird mess when I put my tongue up there, and I have a dentist appointment today.

The federal, state,excise and property taxes have all conveniently come due this month along with the health insurance and fancy Florida restaurant meals. and the blood thinner which is more precious than rubies. Kind of a month long April Fool! The $1200 from Uncle Sam in May is lookin' pretty good, and we will determine for sure if money buys happiness.

I have a very large cat on my lap who is kissing my hand, so life is good. She knows what "kiss" means. Also, "do you want some catnip?" and "would you like to go into the garage?" But I forget myself. Friday is cat blog day.

Not fooled by April one bit.

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Where My Whimsey Takes Me: Food, Cats and the Red Sox

Food for thought: last night, just before the steaks went on the grill, I thought to myself, "those are 'way too big for us to eat both of them." That being said, we ate one and a small piece of the other. This is what you do with leftover steak for another meal:

Create a sauce from mayonnaise, sour cream, Dijon mustard, capers, and salt and pepper.
Slice the cold steak thinly. Serve on a bed of lettuce with thinly sliced red onion rings, tomatoes and the sauce.

I concoct a new dessert. Although beaucoup recipes call for it, instant espresso powder is hard to come by. Medaglia d'Oro used to make it, but I haven't seen theirs in a store for a donkey's age. I buy it from King Arthur catalogue, but I ran out. Wanted to order at least a couple things to merit the postage. I make a South Beach Diet dessert from low-fat ricotta, cocoa, instant espresso powder, a tad of vanilla and 1 1/2 packets of Equal. It tastes good and doesn't induce guilt. But we are out of the espresso powder.

I toasted some sliced almonds, and added almond extract (just a little), low fat vanilla yogurt, to the low-fat ricotta. And the Equal. Mixed it up good in the mixer. Yum! This was a winner. The yogurt made it smooth and creamy. I like the Stonybrook Farm yogurt best.

These are some of my shabby little secrets.

I hauled an extra plastic bag of bird seed to the garage a couple days ago. Today, S.O. and I were on our way to Home Depot, and we wanted to find a galvanized bucket with a lid to store the birdseed in, and another one to dump ashes from the grill. Home Depot had no such animal. I can't understand why a galvanized pail with a lid isn't available everywhere, but so it goes.

When we got home, we found an old pail that would do for the ashes. I noticed some critter had already eaten a hole in the birdseed bag, and the floor of the garage was littered with sunflower seed hulls. The cats have been spending lots of time in the garage, even Thisbe, who parked herself in front of the firewood. So a critter had moved in and helped himself to the birdseed.

While I was looking for a container to dump the birdseed into, Thisbe took off Out of The Garage about 30 MPH, across the lawn to the neighbor's deck. This is unheard of. She never ventures off the porch. Whatever she was chasing, most likely a chipmunk, got away and she discovered she was not in the friendly confines of the front porch or the back deck or the garage. Panic. Tail becomes the size of a baseball bat. I walk over and talk her back to the garage, but she decides it's safer to come in the front door. Tail still huge and fur standing up. Horrors! What came over me? she seems to be saying. My god, what was I thinking of?

We are having a homebody kind of Labor Day. I go to Gerlach in a week and have stuff to do that I have been postponing at home. The icky kind of office work that you really don't ever feel like doing. Indefinitely postponed. Got to get it taken care of.

Last night I wrote the first three paragraphs of Bad Trip, and found the notes I had made about the incident at the Oakland Motel. They read: (desk clerk speaking to very attractive young lady) "He asked, 'what room is the chick with the weird name in?' He saw you check in."
The girl became panicky and checked out immediately and left in a big black car. Hmmm. So what was that all about? It will work in my story.

Now I am off to eat that cold steak and the leftover almond dessert. Life is good. The Red Sox rookie pitched a supremely memorable game last night, a no-hitter. Glad we were home. Glad we weren't watching a movie. Fun and exciting to see the triumph of such a nice young pitcher. Great baseball moment. What a thrill for the folks at Fenway Park.

Onward

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