okay. i try to hide it on this blog (trying to at least appear to be a normal person. see, i didn’t manage that either), but i love quotes. love them. but most of all, i love funny/witty/sarcastic quotes, because i like to pretend that that is my area of expertise. so, i shall be posting a bunch of them on here, and here is the first post to contain such wisdom. ladies and gents, please tip your hats and wave your fans to those who have paved the road for people like, well, not me… normal people:

“The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.” James Branch Cabell

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” Isaac Asimov

“I love deadlines. I especially like the wooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Douglas Adams

well, that’s all for now, but next time i’ll post some by eddie izzard. love him!

let us all rejoice, good people, for more of my plants are sprouting! the peas are growing fast, let’s see if the pictures aren’t blurry (my camera wouldn’t focus properly, wretched thing):

yes, i know. you are all tired of staring at blurry photos of greenery. sorry, sorry. i just love gardens! i wonder if anyone has any tips for growing vegetables… (hint, hint)

okay, so contrary to general opinion (* cough *shawny* cough *) i do not spend my days writing posts on my blog and petting the cat. well, not most days. in fact, i think flirtswithdanger is feeling rather neglected at the moment. so ha, shawny nor am i reduced to a six-year-old when accused of such things.

i’ve recently written four stories, and have been paying careful attention to names. it’s interesting to me when authors give their characters names that reflect their personality, for example, a strict librarian named “ernestine”, or a mysterious character named “mystique”, though that’s a little too obvious for my liking. the last story i wrote had a very friendly child in it, so i named him “kadin” which means “companion”.

when i’m not typing away (yes, yes i am, thank you), i have a job as an illustrator for a magazine. which reminds me, i have a new deadline, because they have recently turned into a bi-monthly, and need more drawings.

well, that’s all for now, folks. i know i am incredibly interesting (no really, i can be! occasionally), but i must get on with work. or the shirking of it. good luck to you on whatever you attempt, and good day.

here are some random favorite pics of mine from france, england, and ireland. i can’t remember which pic is from where, but let me just say every place was beautiful. and without further ado:

right. now i shall go to let you live your normal day. * sigh * while i live my abnormal one.

after our travels in various countries, blondie and i spent some time at shawny’s house. she has a lot of greenery, and here are some pics from early in the morning when blondie, shawny, colorfulheadscarves, and i went out to enjoy her beautiful backyard:

(doesn’t that make you think of a tiny mushroom village? little gnomes bustling around in the top and looking out the holes? it doesn’t? oh. um, let’s see the next pic, shall we…)

i named the last one “shawny’s paradise”. isn’t it beautiful?

day seven of vegetable garden project, a.k.a. trying to raise a garden sans major catastrophe (pretend the first letters of the title are capitalized). teeny adorable little sprouts have popped up, and i dragged colorfulheadscarves and shawny outside in bare feet (did i mention it’s been raining for the past couple days so it’s wet outside?) to croon over them. surprisingly, even shawny, who doesn’t have a garden, took it rather well, and even managed a weak, “ah, yes, look there’s a sprout there,” before escaping my clutches. colorfulheadscarves completely ignored my garden in favor of her collection of a few puny pots tiny plot.

here are some pics:

and to be fair, here’s a pic of colorfulheadscarves’s baby carrot or lettuce- i can’t remember which:

i’ve been catching up on seeing all the friends i left behind. yesterday i saw cookingwriter, who’s doing very well and gave me a tiny pumpkin i named edward (so as to keep up my reputation as “that-insane-writer-lady-who-has-to-name-everything), and went to sewingmommy’s house, where i got to see her new cherub, little’un. i was so dazzled by his unparalleled adorableness that i promptly forgot to take pictures, but let me just say pictures wouldn’t do him justice if i did take them. he is the most gorgeous thing, with teeny little hands and feet and beautiful blue eyes! blondie, colorfulheadscarves, and shawny were there with me, and they love him as much as i do (of course). unfortunately martialartsdude was not there and therefore couldn’t “help” sewingmommy with us by annoying playing with little’un. at two months he seemed hopelessly disoriented a little confused by being passed around by a couple of oddballs, but he smiled all the same.

have you ever had a roommate? or have a roommate? do you remember, or are realizing, after six months, knowing your roommate’s sleeping pattern, favorite p.j.s, bed-head hair, annoying tendency to leave things scattered around (oh, not that i’m blaming anyone in particular… * cough * besidescolorfulheadscarves * cough *), and toothbrush color. you know… things you never really wanted to know.

we-e-ell, i’ve been living with colorfulheadscarves for some time. 10 years, give or take a few months (private joke. it’s funny, isn’t it colorfulheadscarves?) and it never ceases to amaze me how kind she can be.

pour exemple: while i was tirelessly grinding out a new plot outline (shut up yes i was), colorfulheadscarves comes into the room and decides to play with our pet. “you’re supposed to be working,” i tell her (not grumpily at all, oh, no-o-o). “but i haven’t played with her for four days,” she tells me. and i realize she’s right. and i didn’t even notice.

so if she hadn’t been there, it probably would have been several more days before i even glanced at the lonely cutie, so wrapped up am i in very important writing stuff (cuz that’s my job, and i am very good at my job. colorfulheadscarves, stop snorting!). well anyway, thanks colorfulheadscarves (wow, maybe your name is too long), and, yes, i am oblivious.

perhaps if you stopped complaining about your blog name i might be tempted to write another long and heartfelt post about you, colorfulheadscarves.

now shouldn’t i? i haven’t been posting very much, probably because so much has happened and i am dreading having to write it down. i doubt my trip in ireland, england, and france will make it onto the paper (or computer), so let me just tell you it was fun. very fun. birthdaygirl and cameraman are now in distant parts of the world, continuing the adventure. colorfulheadscarves and i are back at home, still sorting through pics, and still roommates. we went to the lovely wedding of hawaiiandude and his beautiful wife, flowergirl. someday, perhaps, i will load all the pics i have accumulating in the camera on here. until then, tata! and have a good day.

i’m way behind on writing (as usual, i hear you groan). i’ve been proofreading a lot, but every time i go through the story i find something else that needs correcting that i didn’t catch the first time. i’m probably not the only one, though. right? right?!

one of my favorites of the stories i’ve written is the lonely moon. here’s an extract:

“Gazing up at the endless dark blue of the night sky, almost black, nearly black, the moon, so bewitching, like a jewel, stuck onto the velvet sky with a pin. The stars were little diamonds, twinkling and gleaming in tune with the light of the moon, carefully placed so that sometimes the brightest form a picture.”

i love it, but shawny’s favorite is one of the first i showed her, the fortune-teller. here’s a bit from that:

“The looming mountains, said to be inhabited by many wicked creatures. But those are only stories, told to the young ones by people as old as me, who have lived many years and know how to keep the children from wandering away into the mountains and getting lost…The one with the plaid cap has dark, greenish-blue eyes, troubled and swirling with emotion, like the sea. My husband had eyes like that, and to this day I had never seen another with eyes quite like his.”

my longest is one called weird odds and wicked ends, which i have been working on for more than a year. sometimes i want to rip up all the incomplete copies of it on paper, and delete for good the ones on the computer, but if i did that, it would be like throwing almost two years if my life away. which would not make me happy.

well, here’s a cute pic to end the post on a good note:

come on, who can resist my adorable kitty, flirtswithdanger?