A Saturday in my town

The view below my bedroom window. 

        There is some risk to setting your work of fiction in the town where you live. When I started my series, I thought, ‘Why invent a new town when I have a perfectly good one right here?’ And so I did, with a fair amount of license: rearranging buildings, changing the name of the roads, moving the middle school, and so forth. My town isn’t a hotbed of murder, but there are times when reality and the world I’ve made up blur.

          Today after breakfast, I figured it was going to be a pretty inactive day, so I went out for a walk around our complex, only about a mile depending on how much weaving in and out you do. 

On the access road into where we live, I spied The Gang standing around idly in the middle, possibly deep in a meeting of whether to go to that side of the road or this one. 

I turned around so as not to disturb them – they’d likely be there for a while working that out. 

          After a shower I set off for the library, which just like in my books, is accessed under a canopy of four Japanese maples. Inside, I checked the new fiction shelves and saw a name that looked familiar. Checking the author’s picture on the inside showed me that yep, I’d met her at my first literary conference when she was a big cheese and I was a newbie. Cool.

     

     My next stop was the D’s, to see what was happening with my books. When I don’t see any of the four, I worry that the library has finally realized what a two-bit writer I am and tossed them. When I do see them on the shelf, I worry that no one wants to check them out. Today three were missing, one still there. Phew.

           I scoffed up four new mysteries, checked them out, and on the way through the entry hall I noticed flyers for upcoming events. Excellent – I can use at least one of them in my current mystery that has a love-sick teen stalking the town’s librarian.

          On my way back to Main Street on this perfect sunny 78-degree day, an 11ish kid went by on his ebike, imaginings of race courses in his head. A young mother pushed a stroller down the sidewalk, another child skipped alongside. And as I waited for an opening to turn, a truck went by with an ecstatic dog, his tongue flapping the breeze.

          Cue the Disney butterflies.

Lost Skills

 

          Okay, so soon no one will be able to read the Constitution – or for that matter, sign their name – since cursive is no longer being taught.

          And I wonder if in a few years anyone will be able to compose a simple paragraph without help, now with all those bots eager to pitch in.

Down the Rabbit Hole

 

          I proved to myself again the wisdom of not feeding the addiction. It’s hard to remember now how it got started again – I just know that I fell deeper and deeper without even realizing it.

The Great Garbage Caper

 

         What a truly odd day.  

          After a pleasantly slow start – tea, toast, reading – I put on my yoga togs and prepared to leave. As I opened the door leading to the garage, I managed to bang my big toe – my bad toe that was already having iffy nail issues after stubbing it two days before. Blood ensued, but I slapped on a band-aid, put on my sandals, and headed into the garage.

Life Lessons

Ages ago – and I mean ages – and in another life, I was at the local Milton Bradley factory taping a brief clip of the production lines.  It was a segment for a small cable children’s show that I produced and shot with a friend.

Bathtub Blues

           I have made progress in life, really. I’m no longer spreading newspapers on the kitchen floor, spraying caustic, lye-based, skin-searing cleaner into my oven, and then 20 minutes later on my hands and knees with my bright yellow rubber gloves (and breath held) wiping that cleaner out with 1,000 paper towels.

At the Wheel Again

          On Sunday I met my partner-in-pottery-crime to try out the pottery studio in my town. It’s a brand-new venture, run by two young women who started from different places, but they seem to have melded together successfully as business partners.