New Links

I have moved the political quiz links to the original post on February 4th which can be accessed via the archive links at left.

The NEW!!! link is for a writing prompt site I found. Lovely, and an interesting read even if you're not a writer.

i always wanted an easy bake oven!

I don't know why I always wanted one. I don't know why I never got one. Maybe I never told the right people (ie: Granny and Poppy!) or maybe I never told anyone at all, but I never had an easy bake oven, and -- to this day -- I have always wanted one.

(Please don't anyone buy me one for my birthday -- it's a ridiculous desire of mine and half the fun is the wanting...)

Anyway, I was intrigued to find out that the Easy Bake Oven is 40 years old, and even more amazed to discover this website dedicated entirely to the toy:


Hasboro Easy Bake Oven


The best bit is the recipes section. And if you want an even more amusing look at easy bake cuisine, go to www.npr.org and find the story about easy bake ovens. It contains recipes for wild mushroom flan and icebox cookies -- baked two at a time.

Deitrich's Coffee - 3:50pm

It's hard to be bohemian these days, I imagine. Hard to catch that Kerouac vibe on frappuchinos and non-fat lattes.

A young man sits at a table on the patio with long unkempt hair and a valiant attempt at a goatee. He picks carefully at his guitar, studying his fingers on the frets the way a novice dancer watches his own feet. His t-shirt sports a minimalist picture of an electrical outlet.

His friends sit nearby with an air of rebellious indifference in their unfashionable clothes. One sketches tattoo designs in an oversized sketch book, his weak double chin dotted with acne and his eyes partially obscured by greasy bangs. A third, with hair down to his waist, sits reading a paperback with yellowed pages. Catcher in the Rye no doubt.

At the table to their left, an elderly man sits doing his daily crossword. On their right, a natty businessman does his taxes on his Apple iBook. But such is the fate of the 21st century beatnik. It was enough for their fathers and grandfathers to sit in smoky cafes thinking revolutionary thoughts. It is much harder for them, when the cafe has been franchised and the thoughts mainstreamed into a high school course on American lit.

French Conversation 1

Nous n'avons pas envie d'alle travailler.
We don't feel like going to work.

Tu n'as pas le choix!
You have no choice!

Il faut bien gagner sa vie!
One has to earn a living!

(This was on my daily French calendar the past few days and I wholeheartedly agree with it.)

Adain

For those of you keeping track, this continues Naida's portion of the story from a few days ago. These blips are picking up and dropping off in the middle of a larger story that exists only in my mind. It's promising as a long term project, but right now I'm just exercising -- stretching and warming up so to speak -- by just writing whatever comes in my head. Feedback is always welcome.

Consciousness eluded him. Of darkness and pain there was plenty, but he found understinding either impossible.

Now and again, a jab of pain, a burst of light, or a cacophonous sound would pierce through the blackness for a moment, but nothing more. It was in one of these moments that he had seen her. For a moment, the haze seemed to have lifted and he clearly saw her startled worried familiar face staring down at him. He wondered when he saw her if he were dying.

When consciousness did decide to tiptoe back to him, it came slowly, creeping like a child filled with guilt and afraid of punishment. First, there was pain. Then, the sensation of the passing of time. Then he remembered the beast. He wondered how long he had lain there in the strange land, wounded and bleeding. Finally, he felt strong enough to open his eyes. The effect was little different from having his eyes closed, because there was very little light. The air was damp and cool, and strange soft noises filled his ears.

His first concern was the pain. Doing his best not to agrivate it, he turned his head to look at his side where he had been gored by the beast. The light was very dim, but he could see that someone had bound the wound in clean strips of some sort of dark cloth. He touched it, gently. The dressings were not wet with blood. Someone had done well. He suspected he would live.

Next, he turned his attention to his surroundings. For a moment, he thought he must be dreaming. He was in a cave, but he remembered that he was many days travel from his home. He squinted around at his surroundings in confusion. The cave was narrow, roughly triangular, shallow, and the roof was shorter than an average man. He was lying on a mat of vegetation that was soft and smelled sweet. The walls were not hewn of stone as were those of his home, but some other rough material. The roof, or what of it he could see from his position prostrate on the floor, was not solid, but rather an amalgum of unidentifiable stuffs. It reminded him of rough hewn cloth.

Before long, he heard the unmistakable noise of something approaching through the dense foliage. Gingerly, he made to sit up, and the noises increased.

"No!" said a voice. "Lie still!" Adain looked up, and his eyes widened. Even in the dim light of the cave, he recognised the pale blue eyes surrounded by white that had so often haunted his dreams.

He stared at the woman as she entered the cave. She knelt beside him and gently pushed him back to the floor. "You shouldn't try to move too much," she said. "You were hurt very badly."

Adain's mind was racing. He wanted to ask her who she was and where she came from and how she had come to be there. He wanted to ask her if she knew him and how she had found him and why she had helped him. All he managed was, "You!"

She sat back and looked at him, a fond familiarity softening the worry in her face. She nodded slowly.

"And you," she replied.

Don't get upset! There will be more, I promise.

politically minded

If you are a little unsure where you stand on the issues or which candidates most closely echo your concerns, try the two new links below. I guarantee you will find the results interesting.

PBS Vote By Issue Quiz for the Democratic Primary

Political Compass Test

Naida

(I'm trying out the name Naida for my fire and water / Romeo Juliet story for the water character. The name means "water nymph.")

Naida paused and looked down. Far below her, on the forest floor, a figure lay prone in the soft fern bed. His hair was wild and bright as sunlight, and his clothes were strange, made of some pale material the color of clouds. Fascinated, Naida headed for the nearest tree trunk and down towards the ground.

As a rule, her people rarely visited the forest floor. To them, it was a place of death, a portal to the afterlife, and the realm of the dead. Naida herself had been down to the earth only once with her brother when their mother had died. She had not liked it. The trees towering above her had made her feel claustrophobic, and so little light filtered down to the earth level that the plants there were strange and alien to her. She had felt pity for the men whose job it was to dig her mother's grave, for she knew they visited the earth almost every day.

The tree she was in did not have a public access way to reach the earth, and she was forced to make her way down by dropping herself from limb to limb, and then climbing down the knots of the trunk. Her leather tunic scraped the bark as she shimmied down the last few inches, and her feet touched the spongy soft layer of earth beneath the ferns.

Looking around her for the first time, she realized she had lost her bearings. Having back-tracked to the nearest trunk, she was now unsure of where she had seen the strange figure. A voice in her mind told her to climb right back up to the canopy and be on her way, but another voice, a stronger voice, urged her to go on.

Timidly, she stepped away from the trunk in the direction she guessed the figure lay. In the late afternoon, the forest at this level was quite dark, and she felt somewhat afraid. She had occasionally seen strange animals that lived on the earth roaming the forest below her, and she did not know if any were dangerous.

Before long she felt very lost. From this vantage, all the trees looked the same, and she could see none of the familiar landmarks by which she navigated far above. She had almost convinced herself to give up the search, when she saw him.

His body had been partially obscured by the tall patch of ferns in which he lay. She rushed towards him and knelt down by his side. From above, she had assumed he was one of her own people, but at this small distance, it was plain he was not. His clothes were foreign to her, his skin dark brown and weathered, and his fiery hair like none she had ever seen. Gently she prodded his shoulder, hoping to wake him. He groaned softly and shifted, but did not open his eyes. As he moved, she gasped. His side closest to her was a mass of blood pouring from a ragged, ugly wound.

"Hello?" she said, shaking him again. "Wake up. Can you hear me?" He groaned again, and his eyelids fluttered open. Naida gasped.

His irises were a dark, deep red like a setting sun, but the rest of his eyes were completely black.

"You," she whispered, recognizing him instantly as the man from her dreams. How could she not have seen it before? The hair, the face, the high cheek bones and strong chin. She had seen that face more times than she could count in her mind, in her dreams. She felt she knew this man as well as she knew herself.

And he was lying on the earth, bleeding, maybe dying.

His eyes stared up at her, blinking rapidly, not really seeing her, then they fluttered closed again.

"Don't move!" she cried. "Stay here! I'll go for help." She leaped up and began to run, but she had already begun to wonder who would help her. Her brother would be suspicious. He would want to put the stranger in a prison as likely as a hospital. Others might react the same way. Only she was familiar with him, knew him, and she could hardly communicated that in a way they would understand. Desperately, she stopped and stared around her.

Not far away was another trunk, its mighty roots spreading out in all directions. She rushed towards it. Between two of the largest roots was a space that had collected a mat of leaves and branches across the narrow space at its top. The result was a small space, wide enough for two people to sit, and deep enough for one person to lie that was dry and sheltered.

Naida sprinted back to the man, her heart racing. She took a deep breath to steady herself and held her hands out above his body. For a moment, nothing happened. She frowned and squinted, increasing her effort, and his body shuddered slightly and began to rise. It floated to no more than a few inches above the earth, but it was enough.

Slowly, carefully, she moved across the forest floor, his body parting the ferns like green water, as she took him to safety and shelter.

idea

In the early 1900s, Santa Fe, New Mexico, a young girl disappears from her family ranch. Her parents search frantically for her, to no avail. They put up a reward for the little girl's return. Weeks after her disappearance, a girl is found with an old cowboy near Amarillo who fits her description. The cowboy claims she is his adopted daughter, but the police don't believe him and he is sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping.

Almost 100 years later, the little girl's granddaughter sets out to try to discover whether or not her grandmother really was the woman whose name she grew up to have.

The past and present are intercut to show the 100 year old mystery and the present day sleuth.

I'm feeling crappy today, so probably no snippet today.

french phrase of the day

Va voir dehors si j'y suis.
Go jump in a lake.
(literally: Go look outside and see if I'm there.)

((And tell me if you see me.))