Category Archives: Deep Thoughts & Fun Stuff
HAPPY EASTER!
This baby bunny cake wishes you and yours a very happy Easter (if that’s what you celebrate). If you don’t, then he wishes you a joyous Sunday and a refreshing spring!
Krissi, Charles, Nathan, and Mikey the cat
I love my ANGRY MAMA!
The Angry Mama will take your microwave to task.
It’s been such a crazy couple of months I sorta fell behind on everything—including housework (NO ONE is to come into my home until I get this place under control). Anyway…the first step in getting this place back on track—other than, of course, a nice big trip to Bath & Body Works to replenish my spring wallflowers and candles, first things first!—was to deep clean the microwave.
The best and easiest way to clean the microwave is to Read the rest of this entry
The GREAT BACKYARD BIRD COUNT is COMING!
Our cat, Mikey, watches juncos and white-throated sparrows from the comfort of his perch in the breakfast nook…he’s ready for the Great Backyard Bird Count! Are you?
The Great Backyard Bird Count is slated for February 18 – 21, 2022 (that’s President’s Day weekend)! This is a really great way to contribute to environmental science—as well as get to know your avian friends!
Participating in this event is free and can be done at home. You can learn all about it here: https://www.birdcount.org/participate/
Unboxing JURASSIC PARK MONOPOLY!
Weekend dinosaur action!
It’s my birthday weekend, and this year I wanted to celebrate my love of dinosaurs, so I got Jurassic Park Monopoly for my friend Bruce, my husband Nathan, my housemate Charles (if he wants to) and me to play in between some dinosaur movies like Area 407 and The Dinosaur Project (and probably others we’ve seen a million times). It was so cool I wanted to share it!
If you like this game and want to pick it up, I got it for about $26 on Amazon (it happened to be on sale when I was looking), but normal list price—at least there—seems to be more toward $30-$40. It’d make a nice gift for the dinosaur/JP freak in your life who has everything else. Here’s the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3GoDNDX
Enjoy!
A little fun with forensic entomology …
My heart actually broke for this poor fly that died in my empty potato chip bowl in June of 2020.
Writers—especially of the darker genres—often joke that after we die, people would find things in our browser histories that might indicate we were actually something more sinister: how long does it take someone to drown, could you actually kill someone with a steak knife?, what kinds of poisons have no smell, how do you rob a bank?
Recently, I had to do some research on types of bugs that might be associated with a dead body. I had taken a really interesting forensics class back when I was working toward my (still unfinished) certificate in archaeology about twenty years ago, but digging up those notebooks in the basement was more daunting than Googling it.
I found this interesting little article from the Amateur Entomologists’ Society called “CSI Entomology: Insects at the scenes of crime.” You can check it out here: https://www.amentsoc.org/insects/insects-and-man/forensic-entomology.html
It’s not complete or very detailed, but it’s a good place to start if you’re a writer and you need to work on this particular level of realism in your stories, or maybe if you just need to make one quick mention (as I did). Have fun!
The day CHALLENGER shattered the sky
My housemate, Charles, had this BETA cassette of news coverage he recorded on the day the CHALLENGER shattered the sky. I’ve done a lot of watching of old footage, and was grateful to discover that what’s on this tape isn’t available online anywhere, at least not yet. I plan on converting the footage to digital/DVD so that it can be preserved at least a little bit longer.
I’m not making light of, exploiting, or glamorizing a national tragedy that broke this nation’s heart. Thirty-six years ago today, the Challenger disaster took seven amazing people and ended an era.
I was a week shy of 15 when it happened, and it profoundly affected me—and still does. In an odd sort of way, the shock of that moment foreshadowed the one that was to come just a few months later, when my mother passed. For many GenXers, it was our first experience with death, and Read the rest of this entry
2021 Wishes & Intentions Update
I’m a couple of weeks behind on this, but January 2 was Wishes & Intentions Day! My friend Heather and I write—just free-flow, no premeditation—things we’d like to accomplish, achieve, receive, or do in the new year. On Wishes & Intentions Day, we open the envelope for the prior year, see how many we got, and then make our new one.
In 2021, out of 63, I accomplished Read the rest of this entry
Three Good Flicks for Haunted House Junkies
It’s stating the obvious: haunted house movies—even not so good ones—are scary, because, on a metaphorical level, what they’re really about is what happens when someplace we deem safe isn’t really safe at all. The house is the stand-in for that secure thing—an actual home, a family structure, a romantic relationship, a job, our physical health—and the “haunting” is the stand-in for anything that threatens it: fire, foreclosure, death, infidelity, unfair treatment, terminal illness. In the end, why haunted house movies are effective—and popular—is because they prey on our fear of destabilization.
This is probably why so many of them have the same tropes—but if you’re a junkie like me, who’ll give any haunted house movie a fair shot until it proves otherwise—you’re used to that; in fact, you expect it.
That said, here’s a couple of recent ones on Netflix Read the rest of this entry
Betty White and the 8 of Cups
It’s everywhere that Betty White died a couple of weeks before her centennial. Although she was special to me for so many reasons, this isn’t a tribute post—it’s really just something I found interesting.
On what would’ve been her 100th birthday on January 17, I was working with my Golden Girls Tarot Deck and the image on the 8 of Cups struck me: Rose is walking away.
Tarot cards have a myriad of meanings, depending on which cards they’re surrounded by in the spread and their provenience. But what struck me about the 8 of Cups is that, while the most dire of its meanings is abandonment, it’s also simply walking away from something that no longer serves you for something new.
This image made me sad, but it was also a comfort. Goodbye, Betty. I hope there’s a whole lot of better cheesecake in the heavenly kitchen.
Ruminations on Romero’s THE AMUSEMENT PARK
I’m going to preface this by saying I’m not even close to knowing much about the late George Romero’s films, and in fact, I’m not even a fan of his work—mostly (I know, understand, and can appreciate its brilliance, and I think he was a genius. Zombies are just not my thing). He has, however, thanks to Night of the Living Dead, become synonymous with a specific brand of horror, so fan expectations are set.
I just watched George Romero’s gorgeously restored lost gem, 1975’s The Amusement Park, which has been available as a Shudder exclusive for a while now. In my opinion, this is one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen; if you enjoy the work my magazine, 34 Orchard, publishes, then you will definitely be into this—this is profound, visceral, disturbing, real-world, inevitable horror.
I will keep this all spoiler-free, Read the rest of this entry
