Tag Archives: novel writing

March 28, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Picture Tricks

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I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging.  I have discovered things by learning from other artists.  I have also discovered things by trial and error.  I have also discovered things by random acts of God.  So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1.  Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing.  All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program.  Simple and cheap to do.  Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2.  Splice stuff together and make new stuff…  I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

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New art out of old;

Val at the barn Val B2 tree time banner

#3.  Weave things together to create unity…  My art is not for its own sake.  I am not Picasso or Van Gogh.  My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels.  (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4.  Promote the art and writing of others…  I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog.  Writers too.  I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from.  If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art).  If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

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#5.  It’s all about digital photography…  In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography.  I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings.  That has not been a life-long way of things.  I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray.  Sunlight?  Incandescent?  Fluorescent?   I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle…  Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them.  I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use.   The word is Paffooney.

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A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense.  Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs.  Do you not know what plethora means?  Try it and you will learn that very good word.

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March 27, 2015 · 1:54 pm

Finding Answers with the Right Questions

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Yesterday I burbled purple paisley prose all over the page and, in trying to answer the question “Why do I Blog?”, only managed to come up with a lame sort of “I don’t know.”  but I also referenced Douglas Adams’ answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything which turned out to be 42.   You see, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we learn that the Earth is nothing but an alien-designed supercomputer run by highly intelligent mice to find the actual question that goes with that ultimate answer.  Unfortunately, after the planet Earth is destroyed by Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass, the question is put on hold.  That’s really what I did yesterday.  I put the question on hold.

But today, feeling ill and a little blue, I decided to percolate the old teapot of wisdom one more time to see if I could find an answer in the tea leaves.  I am not a well sort of individual.  As I have posted before, I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983.  Every day I wake up to a new dawn is a bit of a miracle.  But the sand is running out of the hourglass.  There are things I have to put right, and blogging is a way to do that.

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In this photo Paffooney I am sharing one of my recent miracle sunrises.  6:55 looking East from the Greenbelt in the middle of Carrollton, Texas.  The dog exercises me every morning in order to keep me alive on the off chance that I will drop some bacon on the floor one morning in the near future.  She also uses me to bag up poop so she can stay out of trouble with the city.

Every morning is like that now.  I am retired.  That is a less-painful way of saying “waiting to drop dead”.  I spend a good portion of my day now alone and able to write and think and not do very much else.  So what I write and think has to be the real work that I am doing now to justify the amount of food I eat and air I breathe (and bacon I drop as the dog has just reminded me.)  I have recently finished two novels.  I have a novel waiting to be published, with a contract and everything at a small, but very real publisher.  I have two books already in the marketplace, Catch a Falling Star and Aeroquest.  You can find them and ignore them on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com just like everyone else has been doing.  The books are what I am technically blogging about.  I am blogging by command of I-Universe publishing.  But that’s not really why I am doing it.  There is so much more to it than that.

Here’s the realist’s assessment of my writing… it has become a very expensive and time-consuming hobby that eats up my remaining days like a ravenous wolf.  At the rate I am going, I will not live to see the day when my writing finds wide-spread acceptance.   I have the word of professional editors and other writers that my work is very well-written, and there was a time in my life when I might’ve made a decent living at it like Terry Brooks or R. A. Salvatore.  There was a time when good books found a publisher.  Now, there is the little problem of a world teeming with books all clamoring for notice of their own.  I am generally ignored by the masses.  The local library didn’t even put the gift copy of my book, paid for with my own money, on their shelves.  They didn’t give it back, either.  My time is not yet, and my audience is probably made up of people not born yet.  Maybe they simply don’t exist.

But all those mulched-up and melancholy things I have said about my writing amount to nothing in the face of the question, “why are you still bothering to blog?”  Truthfully, in the past few months I have made myself laugh and made myself cry by writing and telling stories… by mangling metaphors and propagating purple paisley prose… by blogging.  And I really don’t care if no one ever reads my blog full of blather and allusive alliterations.  They exist.  They are real.  And I have offered them to the world.  Why do I blog?  I still don’t have any idea.

first flowers

These are the very first flowers that bloomed in our neighborhood this year that didn’t die a horrible death by freezing.  Sure, they are only common dandelions and many think of them as weeds… but they are also proof that for now the sun continues to shine and possibilities continue to bloom.

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March 26, 2015 · 12:18 pm

The Meaning of 42

little Toy Trio

I get goofy ideas for blog posts when I am reading other blog posts, when I am reading books, and when I am letting television suck the smart out of my brain cells.  I was first inspired by reading this blog post from In My Cluttered Attic.  He was talking about why he chooses to blog in the face of a plethora of common-sense reasons not to.  “Good idea for my own blog post!” said the insane voice that inhabits the dark space behind my mind’s own creative filing cabinet #42 in the second dungeon under my memory.  I immediately filed the idea away in that cabinet because the cabinet was close at the time and I might never find it again later.  Then I leaped to a post by The Off Key of Life in which I found a beautiful song beautifully sung that made me trip over another file cabinet that was behind the mechanical letter-sorting machine on the stairway landing to the sub-basement of the second dungeon.

Some old memories spilled out on the stone steps because I used to sing that song to my three babies when I rocked them to sleep twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, and thirteen years ago.  That song, and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio.  Both of those songs are about one day finding the key to happiness… or possibly the key to understanding… but definitely about the search for the key.  I always believed that those songs would give my children sweet dreams… and I prayed that the songs would never become the source of nightmares.

And then I was watching Hulu, an episode of Arrow in which Oliver Queen must decide on the reason why he was doing the whole superhero-vigilante thing and risking his life constantly.  Unfortunately I didn’t find the file box that has superheroes in it that I was looking for in hallway leading to Area 51 in the upper dungeon.  But I knew the topic was going to be “Why I Blog”.  That settled, I began to write and paste in all sorts of random stuff.

“What is the meaning of 42?” you ask?  How clever of you to ask that!  In Douglas Adams’ seminal series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books

the_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galaxy 42 is revealed to be the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.  Practically everything that he adds to that epic trilogy of five-or-so books is basically random.  And yet, it is not.  He is telling us about the apparent randomness of Life, the Universe, and Everything while carefully explaining how all this random madness that is Everything actually fits together in a very random-mad way.  There is a certain asymmetrical symmetry about it all that has a certain contradictory sort of beauty, if you get what I mean.  (A certain ugly beauty if you don’t get what I mean.)

So why do I blog?  Good question.  I don’t really have an answer to it.  I blog because my first publisher told me I had to do it to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star.  My book has netted me $28 so far, as long as I am not fool enough to start subtracting all the money I have spent trying to advertise and promote my book.  I’m not fool enough.  I stay out of that corridor in the maze of my complicated little mind.  I blog because I can share all the private drawings and poems and insane nonsense that fills the filing cabinets in my mind without paying a hefty psychiatrist’s fee.  Your underwear drawer needs to be aired out once in a while even if you do remember to wash your underwear.  And it is liberating to walk around figuratively naked in front of an audience that potentially includes little old church ladies, God, and everybody.  I blog because writing is something that I do, have always done, and will continue to do until they put my smelly corpse in a pine box and bury it under the garbage pile out back.  All that scribbling has to count for something sometime.  And maybe that sometime is now.  If you are one of those poor souls suffering from Serial-Mickey’s-Blog-Reading Disorder (a condition the CDC has taken to labeling SMBRD… not to be confused with small-bird flu), and you actually read the posts and look at all the random junk piled into those mad paragraphs, you may just accidentally stumble across that key we have all been searching for for eons… and unlike the majority of the world, you will be giggling insanely for a reason!

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March 25, 2015 · 12:02 pm

A Maker of Books

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For an awfully long time I have been filling blank pages with junk and goofy stuff and saving it in book form.  I think it began when I was a Junior in high school.  At least, that is the oldest of the homemade books I could find.  I fill these handmade and factory-made blank books with stories, drawings, poems, clipped pictures, nonsense, secrets, shamelessly plagiarized gunk, and anything and everything.  At 58 and one half years of age, I have been doing this insane thing for a very long time and have quite a pile of it.  The above is my Tales of Fantastica, a cartoon journey into my own dreams and personal life.

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I believe, based on physical evidence that the first collected writing I have done is in my Journal, Rage.  It is called that because I named it after a Dylan Thomas poem in which he “raged against the dying of the light” because he was venting on the subject of his father’s death and the dread of living a life without being allowed to really be alive… to really live.  I wanted to write down everything I noticed about being alive… my hopes, my fears, my dreams as fully as I could remember them… and it became, over time, quite ripe and fertile, as stored garbage usually will.  I was able to use it as a source for other stuff.  I have at least nine volumes of this journal composed over a period of twenty-some years… before I started depositing my daily dose of words and interior monologues in other places.

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My old drawing notebook goes all the way back to 5th grade.  I saved almost every drawing and doodle I did as a grade-school-and-middle-school doodler.  It has some of my very first cartoons and bird drawings and monsters that I filled my quiet hours in childhood with instead of doing the homework I was supposed to be doing.

In college, specifically Cow College… Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, I first began putting stories into novel form.  These I kept in binders and neatbooks that I had to illustrate the covers of with my own story-specific logos.

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Here is the first manuscript of Superchicken, the first manuscript that I actually finished and followed all the way through with.

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This book-maker-mania followed me even into the classroom.  I collected classroom drawings from students, either as gifts from them or confiscated from them and put them into the binder I call my Gallery.  This will make an interesting post of its own in the near future.

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And I am still not cured of making my own covers, even though I am now trying to make them into traditionally publlished books.  Here is the cover for Superchicken.

superchick_novelI suppose I will never really be cured of this mental aberration for as long as I still live.  I don’t know what my heirs will do with them when they are finally rid of me once and for all.  But it is all something I don’t regret doing.  And besides, I couldn’t help it.

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March 17, 2015 · 6:34 pm

François

Francois spotlight  What I am endlessly burbling about today in purple paisley prose is a raw novel idea.  I have not started to cook it, bake it, or even burn it at all yet.  It is not ready for the writing oven.  It is still that mass of daydreams, nonsense, and foofy-foofram that we former English teachers like to call Pre-Writing.  (Note the capitol letters… teachers make this goop high on the writing-process, lies-the-teacher-has-to-tell list, because, otherwise students will glop out some words on paper and call it a final draft without even re-reading or thinking about the dang thing.)  (Note too the use of the parenthetic expression that breaks up and uglifies the paragraph and identifies this writing as less-than-serious purple paisley prose.)  This goofy post is obviously, then, not only about Pre-Writing, that’s exactly what it is… gloppy, sloppy word mash that I hope to one day boil into something stunningly beautiful.

So here’s what I actually have.  I have a character.  His name is François Martin (not pronounced the Iowegian way, Frank-oyce Mahr-tinn, but the French way, Fran-swah Mahr-tah… because the character is actually from France… duh!) (I will have to post an explanation of Iowegian and the foreign language the people of Iowa actually speak another day.)  François is a recently orphaned young boy whose father, Rejean, was a masterful and loving parent who made the mistake of relying on relatives to take care of his children in the case of something bad happening to him and his wife.  Car accidents are bad and tend to happen too fast to correct this sort of mistake.  François Is sent to live with the family of his father’s American half-brothers and half-sister in Norwall, Iowa.  Here’s where the trouble starts.  Victor Martin, the eldest brother, is the only one of the three who even has a job.  He owns and operates a seedy Midwestern bar in the middle of the tiny town and is universally disliked and berated by local church ladies (the heart and soul of any Midwestern town in the 1980’s.  The other uncle and the aunt are even worse.  They are lazy, detestable, foul-mouthed… and those are their good points.  The other uncle, Richard, has a son named Billy dropped off one day by the hated ex-wife and made to live in the basement of the old house they bought when Ona White’s relatives actually decided to sell her house after her untimely death by werewolf.  Okay, you see by now that this is a tragic story full of emotional heart-ache and pain… and bursting with humorous potential.

This nebulous family drama idea has a name.  Originally I called it Little Boy Crooner because François can paint his face with sad-clown paint and sing karaoke like an angel… an angel who can potentially save his horrible half-uncle’s business and horrible-er family.  I have re-titled it Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns because I added to this novel-notion the idea that François also loses himself in dreams and finds his way to H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands via the magic ways of the three clowns from the Dreamlands, Mr. Disney, Mr. Dickens, and Mr. Shakespeare.   What a mess of an idea!  but I am betting that if I live long enough to get to it, it will be among the best things I have ever written.

Francois

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March 14, 2015 · 3:15 pm

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius

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I have just finished the final edit of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  PDMI may not be ready for another novel from me, but it is ready for an editor or beta reader to be looking at it.  I will not be making any further changes because of my perception of the shape, style, and meaning of the novel.  I need input to proceed.  I need to advance to publication.

Blue in the back yard

This novel is about a lot of things.  It is science fiction.  It is a time-travel and alien-contact story.   But the thing it is really about, theme-wise, is friendship.   It is about the friends we need, the friends we have, what makes a friend, and how you treat a friend.  It is about love.  It is about love that has nothing to do with sex.  It is about love between boys and girls, about love between boys and other boys, about love between a man who has lost his wife and son and a boy who has lost his best friend, and even about the love between family members who love each other even when they disagree and don’t like each other very much.  It is also about love between a boy and his rabbit and how it changes when the rabbit is turned into a rabbit-man by the time machine.

My Art of Davalon

Okay, part of the reason that all sounds so terribly complex, is because of the structure I adopted for this novel.  This novel is a unique sort of sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  I call it a Prequel-Equal-Sequel because it takes place before, during, and after the events of the other book.  The primary characters are also different.  The main protagonists in the first book are only minor supporting characters in this book.   The supporting characters from Catch a Falling Star, the inventor and bicycle-wheel engineer Orben Wallace, and his next-door neighbor boy, Timothy Kellogg (also the grand and glorious and ludicrously uproarious leader of the Norwall Pirates, a small-town liars club of country boys), have become the protagonists.

It was all a very complicated process to write, but also strangely fun and deeply engaging to do.  I originally assumed because it was overly complex and facetious, that it was really not that good.Millis 2

Re-reading and editing, though, has caused me to think that it actually a very good story.  I know that it is not as good a piece of writing as either Snow Babies or Magical Miss Morgan, but it has a very significant part to play in the over-all story arc of my home-town novels.  It develops critical characters like the two protagonists, Mike Murphy, Blueberry Bates, Cudgel Murphy, Mary and her daughter Dilsey Murphy, and, of course, Valerie Clarke.  So, this is a sort of celebratory post.  I have finished another project and must now move on to the phase where I must try to get it published and publicized, packaged and promoted.

RabbitWalker

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March 10, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Sharing

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Yesterday I re-blogged a post by Daven Anderson because he was doing such an excellent job of promoting my current publisher PDMI Publiching, LLC.

Daven’s post about PDMI

PDMI Banner 2014

I am relying on this publisher to get my work into print.   I have no way of knowing how much longer I can stay alive since only six incurable diseases, financial hardship, and the cruel winds of fate are all trying to overturn my little metaphorical boat.  I have found them to be like a family, concerned about all of the members and willing to go to great lengths to help.  I am pinning my literary hopes on them.  If my novels don’t get noticed soon and cared about by someone other than me, they may die out shortly after I do.  At the rate I am going, I don’t know how many I can push into existence, and I’m fairly sure I will not see all of them in print.  But I am trying.  This is my legacy, my lifetime of collected wit and wisdom, and it is the most worthy thing about me.  So I am trying very hard to promote everything I can to help make the publishing company as a whole to thrive and work.  But it is not for this reason only that I promote the work of others.

It is my philosophy of literature and art that good work must be shared.  If you haven’t seen my posts about Loish, or William Adolphe Bouguereau, Norman Rockwell, or Maxfield Parrish, you really should look them up.  I mean the artists, though I won’t object if you want to find and read my posts, either.  Part of my job as a writer and a cartoonist is to make others aware of the good things I have found in life.  And good art, good story-telling, good music… those things are some of the very best things that humanity has to offer.  It is those creations that are the true purpose of life on Earth.  We may not be around as a species very much longer because we are such poor care-takers of the planet, but human culture in all its depth and richness had to exist.  It is the real purpose God granted to us.

So I encourage everyone who creates art of any kind… anyone who looks at, reads, or listens to art of any kind, to please share anything and everything you find that is good.  The more good there is, the less room there is for evil to exist.

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March 9, 2015 · 3:57 pm

Blue Monday Visit to the QT

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I have to admit to having cheated on my first love.  But I have come back now to be faithful from here on out.  Last Summer I bought one of those free-refill cups at RaceTrac.  But it was unfulfilling.   You only get 20 oz. in the free refill cup.  And the free refills expired at the end of July.  So I have come back to the daily, or even twice daily, 32 oz. cup of Diet Coke from QT.  You knew that’s what I meant, right?

I know all the employees at QT at least by sight if not by name.  I don’t even have to tell them any more that the plastic cup I am using is a carefully saved and cleaned cup so that I deserve the refill price.  (I am not a curmudgeon who has to save ten cents on every purchase.  I do it to re-use and recycle and save the planet Earth from wasted plastic.  Really I do.)  They also know without my saying that even though it says “debit card” on the front, it works as credit.  (Except for that one kinda stupid guy who only works the really late and really early shifts.)  One of the workers there is a neighborhood kid that was in my class for two days when I was a substitute history teacher at Long Middle School nine years ago.  He’s changed a lot from when I first knew him.  He has turned from a goofy, bean-bodied twelve-year-old with big brown myopic eyes and a fly that never stayed zipped into a massive hulk of a twenty-one-year old service station associate worker.  He doesn’t even realize that I knew him when…

Grandma, Henry, and the Princess on the Beach

Grandma, Henry, and the Princess on the Beach

…and I know it is kinda pathetic that I am now so limited in my contact with the rest of humanity, especially with the family away in Florida for Spring Break, me stuck at home with illness and a pooping dog, and being retired without any working-man’s daily duties any more, that a visit to QT is the highlight of my day.  But it isn’t.  The highlight occurs when I start writing.  I enjoy laughing at my own funny-bits in this post, and the novel that I am working on… well, flights of fancy is putting it mildly.  I have been up in World War I biplane, in the midst of a dogfight between a promising young Allied pilot for the Lafayette Escadrille  and a German ace who represents evil incarnate and is being controlled by an evil alien-designed robot from the future.  I also have been in the tunnels under Castle Sinistre, or Château Sinistre as it is known in the Somme.  There I have been with the time-travelling heroes who are trying to rescue a rabbit-man created by an evolutionary science experiment gone wrong and an insane brother-in-law of the scientist who created the rabbit-man.  My imagination breaks free of the stifling cage my old, lame body and my current life have become.

Snowboy

This little essay quite accurately reflects what I write and why I write it.  Happy people and healthy people and normal people would all be on the beach instead of where I am now.  They would never be home-bound Emily-Dickenson writer-people whose daily highlight is a cup of Diet Coke from QT  But I am in the clouds now, somewhere over the rainbow, and I am content, because that’s the corner I’ve written myself into.

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March 6, 2015 · 1:49 pm

What I Have Learned by Writing

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I have been doing an edit on a completed novel called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and I have discovered that I have grown quite a bit as a writer since I first began practicing the craft.  This particular story has been rattling around in my brain since 1977.  The mad scientist who is the title character, Orben Wallace, is based loosely on me.  It is also to some degree a favorite science teacher from high school mixed up with a rather eccentric college professor whose bizarre nature led, apparently, to some really profound insights about the scientific reasoning process and how a person thinks rationally.  From this character recipe I have learned the scientific method of experimenting, observing, theorizing, and testing theories works in all areas of life, including the complex mess that is our social life and relationship muddle.  Order can be imposed on chaos, and even when chaos is not controlled, it can still be tamed.

I have learned also a thing of two about writing science fiction.  I have made this story very science-y by adding elements of time travel, UFO’s, and conspiracy theories… as well as genetics, nutrition, black holes, and history from 1916 (World War I).   I have done significant amounts of research because, even though the science is all about big, black, hoo-haw lies and prevarications, it sounds a lot more realistic and palatable if the science is right.

I have learned a few things about writing sequels and tie-ins.  This novel is technically a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  No, that’s not right either.  It is a prequel-equal-sequel because it happens before, during, and after the previously published book.  I have learned to pick up scenes from the other book and rewrite them from the point of view of a different character than the story before.  The dialogue is already fixed, but the interpretations and commentary on everything is from a whole different perspective.  Not easy to do, but very enjoyable and educational.

I have learned that even though I am basically writing a comedy it also has to have its beautifully sweet-sad moments of melancholy to achieve balance and depth of theme.  Two beloved characters die in this book, whereas in Catch a Falling Star only the villain dies without getting a last-second resurrection at the end.  We do terrible things to our characters sometimes if it gives the book deeper meaning and resonance with reality.Millis 2

I do still slavishly rely on the ridiculous.   One of the characters in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a rabbit who bites a high-tech carrot attached to the time machine and morphs into a rabbit man.  Millis, the pet rabbit, is the second Paffooney I am repeating for this recycled sort of post.

I have also learned that by using my obsession with that which is surreal, I can actually write things that make me laugh even though I’ve read and re-read them ten times, and am now reading them again.  Humor comes from word-play and cleverness as well as from situations full of slapstick.

So, whether you can stand my purple paisley prose…or not, I am definitely working towards throwing a new novel out there… into the world of publishing… or am I throwing it at your head instead?

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March 5, 2015 · 3:59 pm

Snow Day Again… In March?

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20150305_083349It is truly amazing how little snow it takes to totally paralyze a city like Dallas.  Chicago would be embarrassed to death at having to close school down on a sunshiny day with less than a foot of snow on the ground.  But Dallas likes to build major roadways up into the air so freezing air can hit the underside as well as the upper side of roads that, once shut down by a hideous three-car five-death accident on sheets of super-slippery ice, totally prohibits movement from one side of the metroplex to the other.

I have considerable pain from my arthritis, and I am shut down most of the time anyway.  But with the city closed around me, there is not much left to do but sit and write and make fun of southerners who can’t drive on snow because they don’t realize that speeds below seventy miles-per-hour do exist in the real world.  I have had time to further work on the final edit of my novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  I also had time to submit my novel Magical Miss Morgan to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA novel-writing contest called the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction.  265469780

I don’t have a head full of straw and really believe I am going to walk away with a top prize.  But I did enter this contest before with Snow Babies, and that book made it into the final round.  It will help my manuscript get published.  Who knows?  I may score something bigger than an Indie publisher this time around.  Maybe I can get an agent.  (Okay, there’s a little straw in there.  I will have to clean more carefully next time.)

But old, broken, bed-ridden me with nothing but time to lay around and fiddle with the computer am definitely making good use of my snow day.  I took pictures of the snow.  I walked the dog in it.  And I didn’t have to drive to any schools or school events.  Hot dang!  What a fine life.

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