Thunder grumbling in the east, and this in the evening sky:
My little camera doesn’t do it justice. It was a beautiful sky, just lovely. And now the distant showers have cooled the air into the low 80s. All the doors and windows are open, ushering in the first fresh air of the fall. At last the hot summer is over, the summer we live through by huddling inside air-conditioned boxes.
The air is very still and humid, so every fan in the house is on, trying to move thge proposed fresh air through. But that notwithstanding, it’s happy.
In Arizona, you can ask for (and get) a spare driver’s license by going online and filling out a little form. Very handy! They don’t want to give you an extra when you go in for a new license, but they’ll send you one after the fact.
Right away, it goes into the car: an ash tray is the perfect stash.
I really dislike lugging a purse around. Often I don’t — visiting a friend, going to choir practice, whatever: why haul the kitchen sink with you?
So I don’t. O’course, that means every time I go someplace where I don’t have to buy something, I put myself at risk of arrest. All it would take is a fender-bender for the cops to haul me off.
Why not carry the plastic license around in a pocket? Two reasons:
a) Women’s clothes often have no pickets; and b) I can’t remember my name, much less where I last put something. Does anyone seriously expect me not to lose a driver’s license doing that?
True, hiding it in the car also poses a degree of risk: whoever steals my car gets my driver’s license, too. But phbthhphtbbttt! He who steals my car or my driver’s license steals junk.
Typically, if I need to go to a store after, say, church or choir practice, I’ll hide the purse under some junk and leave it in the car. One nice thing about a van with smoked windows is that it has a lot of places people can’t see from the outside. So it’s six o’ one, half-a-dozen of the ′tother. Actually, more than half-a-dozen. If they steal the car and get my purse, they also get three credit cards, a debit card, a Medicare card, two insurance cards, and a phone.
It’s a lot easier to replace one driver’s card than all that trash.
****
In other news, Amazon has posted Fire-Rider 15:The Weaver. Click on the link to the right to access that.
These stories really, really need some reviews. I think I’ll drop the price on the first half-dozen of them to 99 cents, by way of making them a little more tempting. How’s about picking up a couple and scribbling a few lines about the things?
Possibly of more entertaining interest, our Racy Books will start going online the first part of October. I have three more Fire-Rider installments to get off my desk, and then we’ll start publishing about 10 erotic frolics each month.
At least, that’s our goal. Four authors have joined me in this endeavor. We’ll be publishing the things under a single pseudonym: Roberta Stuart. Partly to build name recognition — if all four of us were scribbling under different names, we couldn’t get as many books out under any of our names, and partly (of course) to maintain a veil of privacy. Some of us have employers who might frown at a side gig that entailed writing racy novelettes, and some would just as soon not have our mothers or our pastors find out what we’re up to.
Watch this space!
Roberta Stuart is a university professor who has a secret life. When she’s not in a classroom, a library, or a faculty meeting, she’s “a member of the country club.” And she’s got friends in low places—lots of them.
Wannabe a writer? Or an artiste? Or the 21st century’s answer to Bach? Well, all you have to do is summon the Muse, eh?
LOL! Personally, I’ve never been much of an acolyte of the Muses…inspiration lurks in the “Pay to the Order of…” line of a well-written check. But some of us revel in the emotional tug of a mystical impetus to inspiration.
The “Muse” answers to one call: hard work. Work at learning one’s art. Work at practicing it. Work at perfecting it.
Meanwhile, not an awful lot of Musing got done around here today. Book 14 of Fire-Rider went up (to the right). Tweets got twittered. Correspondence got sent to authors. A couple of authors got paid (one belatedly!). A meeting got met. The e-book builder got discussed with. The mess that is my computer filing system got a start on a cleanup. None of it what you’d call “inspired.”
Nothing like a blog post to occupy yourself while you snack on figs and cheese. Have been working on marketing Camptown Races most of the day, with the exception of a brief trip to the drugstore & the grocer’s. Finally got a Twitter page established for the Camptown Ladies: https://twitter.com/RacyLadies
If you’re into Twitter, please follow them! Mwa ha ha! They love camp(town) followers. 😉
Very soon now, we’ll have a Giveaway contest: The girls need names! I suggested they might like to be called Madison and Ashley, but they didn’t much like that idea. And Aunt Tilly was abhorred!
So it was decided that we would ask the Hive Mind to come up with something fitting and true. Watch for that!
LOL! I’ll bet you can’t guess who Aunt Tilly is.
Aunt Tilly is my grandmother, Olive, whom I never met. She was a flapper, in the true sense of the word — which was somewhat pejorative at the time. Apparently she was one wild little number.
A divorce-court judge removed my mother from the custody of both Olive and her caddish husband, assigning the three-year-old to the care of the cad’s parents. The previous child, whom I found out about only when I unearthed my mother’s birth certificate after my father had died, must have been adopted out — Olive was 18 when my mother was born. So…what can one say?
Except, Olive, my dear: You are PERFECT for Aunt Tilly!
She certainly was a woman highly qualified to pronounce the words “Not husband material.” The ideal mentor for the Camptown Ladies.
As long as we’re uploading images… How do you like this new entry in the Home Decorating Awards Competition?
That little Talavera pot contained an elephant’s-foot plant that had taken root (from sprigs) and so outgrown its soil that there effectively was no soil left. It was shriveling from lack of water, especially in this summer’s unholy heat. Exit the elephant’s foot, into a larger pot.
Then it occurred to me that one of those little orchid plants you find at HD and Trader Joe’s would fit perfectly in there. And it does!
Here at the Funny Farm, orchids will survive, but they don’t grow appreciably. I expect this one will live for two or three years before giving up the ghost or outgrowing its home. Kinda cute, isn’t it?
To attach it to the wall, I hung the top end (which has a length of florist’s wire strung through a pair of holes in the back side) from one nail, and then a few inches below it inserted a tack into the wall which holds the pot’s lower end away from the drywall. To water it, of course, I’ll set it in the sink. But this will obviate any damage should I fail to wipe it dry before hanging it back up.
Ah. I see Amazon has responded to my query with an explanation as to how to establish a Goodreads Author profile.
As usual, it bypassed the ’hood. We dwell in the rainshadow of the North Mountains, and so the Valley could have a 400-year flood and we’d barely notice. Literally: only a few drops of rain fell here, barely noticeable. A brief, brisk windstorm came through but nothing that could do any damage. We could hear the thunder to the south, like a nonstop cannonade. But that was about it.
My son just got in from Colorado and picked up Charley the Golden Retriever, who has resided here since last Thursday night. Don’t know whether his house has power or not — he thinks so, though, because his Nest thermostat responded to some communiqué that he sent to it today. Hope so, ’cause it’ll be mighty hot inside that little house if the AC has been off all day.
Today has been so humid, it’s been hot and sticky even inside air-conditioned buildings. The weather service is predicting, in a rote way, the usual “chance” of isolated thunderstorms, another way of saying “we have no clue.” Last night’s “chance” knocked out power to 13,000 people.
As is typical, we had no storm or even a sprinkle in this part of town, though we did have a brief, brisk blow.
However, we did have a weird happening. Along about 9 or 10 p.m., a strange, loud electrical sound burst out just to the north of the Funny Farm, a kind of wwWWMRARMRMRMRMMMMWRMM. I could see a bright, orangey light through the curtains.
It wasn’t lightning — wrong color. Lightning’s blue in these parts. And the sound was definitely not thunder.
The dogs were alarmed. I didn’t think much of it.
But then about ten minutes later it happened again, and the flare was much brighter and then the power went out. I got up to look: absolutely no storm going on.
The noises sounded electrical, and I thought I could see a fire at the end of the street. And I thought the sound and flashes had come from the vicinity of Manny’s house.
Our tract has underground utilities. So if it was over by Manny’s place, then…???… It sounded like a big power surge — like this one.
But can a power surge be visible when the power lines are underground?
The surrounding tracts have overhead lines, so if a surge or a transformer malfunction occurred in one of them, it would have happened a little further away than Manny’s house.
I finally decided the “fire” was somebody’s headlights (or something) and went back to bed. The dogs remained disturbed for awhile, but after the power came back on, they settled down.
Strange night.
And right now it’s hot and sweaty in here even though the AC is pounding away. Enough. I’m going to bed, or maybe to bed down on the cool tile floors.
That’s one of the reasons desert dwellers have tile floors, after all…
