The vacation de-brief

I'm going to be busy today, mostly editing (and taking care of household stuff in the breaks), but I wanted to give you a brief recap of our vacation. My humor column is on hiatus while I run for office (Placentia Library District Trustee), so I need an outlet to tell people about my latest adventure.

As I said in an earlier post, we went to the Plumas National Forest, where we stayed at the Gray Eagle Lodge. This is what it looks like:

We've done this for I think about 10-12 years now, with several families. We are all friends, with children of similar ages, and it's been wonderful and frightening and significant to watch these kids grow up together. This is how I'll always remember them, no matter how old they get:

When I think about the trip, there are a lot of, well, unwonderful things. I hesitate to call them negatives or lowlights. Weirdlights. That's what they were.

For one thing, there was the heat. We left the 100-degree heat of southern California, drove 10 hours (in two days) to arrive in the 90-degree heat of northern California. Wasn't much of an improvement, I can tell you. There were some cool-ish days by the lakes, and we were even rained on once, but every morning's walk was done in short sleeves and bug spray, every evening's meal left me feeling sweaty when I got up from the chair, and we slept with all the windows open and the fan on.

This was not our normal trip.

Then there was the changing makeup of the group. I've written about our friend, Jim Barnes, who used to join us but passed away from pancreatic cancer. This was our second year without him, but I felt his absence even more than the first year. Perhaps we were trying to be too brave and upbeat last year. This year felt emptier.

Now, we have a family in the midst of divorce. I'll spare you the details, except to say my darling friend was blindsided by the husband she thought she knew for over 20 years, which has shattered my trust in him as a friend. They split the vacation in half this year. She took the front end and he took the back end. I enjoy her company so much, I hated to see her go and I hated to see him arrive and I just don't know what to even say to him that doesn't involve striking him with a large, heavy object. Yes, people are fallible and I'm not the boss of them and I need to forgive him for something that's none of my business.

I'm a bad witch, okay?

To top everything with an extra helping of WTF?, it turns out our dear little Lady Spazzleton is not quite what the doctor examined. After a thorough round of finding a scar and palpating her insides, he pronounced that she had been spayed, even signing off on the papers for her license.

While we were on vacation, she came into heat. There is no mistaking it. The licking, the tail-lifting, and the advances made by the intact boy dog at the lodge made it absolutely clear. Now we have to wait a few weeks (dogs are in season for at least 21 days) to get her REALLY spayed. You know, with all that money we have lying around the house after our vacation.

Oh, and she ate another leash.

Otherwise, she had fun at the lakes, except she wanted to be in the water All. The. Time. And if there were ducks or squirrels or chipmunks around, she wanted to catch them. She wanted to catch them badly, to the point of making a whiney-gargle sound if she couldn't at least try. It sounded like a soprano Chewbacca.

Duffy pretty much though she was an idiot.

The kids all had fun, too. They went on the kayak and the innertubes and the stand-up paddleboard, and got sunburned and laughed a lot and seemed to be kids again for awhile.

The thing is, despite the icky parts of the trip, I still remember it with a light heart and believe I had a good time. I hung out with my friends, went on some nice hikes, ate great food, and even managed a horse ride.

Am I delusional or just an optimist?

LOOK over here

God bless that Tameri Etherton. I just got home from a week's vacation in the Plumas National Forest. It's about a 10 hour drive if you want to come back in one day, which we did. We managed to make it home by 10:30, ripped through a drive-thru for instant food, then drove home and found we'd been locked completely out. Our lovely son broke in, but by the time we had brought the bags in, eaten, and checked the Facebook status, it was after midnight.

Today, I am completely wiped out, feeling the need to hop back into real life, and not knowing what to do first, or even second.

Enter Tameri, who was tagged in a little blogging game and tagged me. It's called LOOK and I'd post the little picture of the meme (or is that redundant?) but I'm exhausted and likely to post something that would crash computers worldwide. The rules are to go to your latest work-in-progress and search on the word "look". Once you find it, copy and paste the section to your blog. Then tag a bunch of people. They're supposed to do the same.

I'm so tired I barely know my name, so tagging is out, but thanks to Tameri, I'm at least kick-started in forward progress today. If you want to join the game, copy and paste your work to your blog, then leave me a link in the comments. I can probably still read.

This is from the second chapter of the third, untitled, unedited, mystery.

* * *

The smell had hit her first, followed by the smoke. A private investigator's job is to be curious, so she loped toward the source, and saw fire engines pulling out of Angelina Drive, onto Morse. Two police cars were at the corner, officers directing traffic away from both streets. Fortunately, it was already mid-June, meaning the elementary school was out for the summer and keeping the police from having to re-route frazzled parents.

Now she stood and looked at the devastation. She wanted to cry, and it wasn't even her house.

It belonged to Benny Needles.

Benny was a one-time client, part-time assistant, and full-time needy little man with a big obsession for Dean Martin. He had spent the last couple of years running through his inheritance, stuffing his house with Dino items that he bought on eBay. Peri was never sure whether he was actually a hoarder. While his house was so full it was difficult to move around, it was full of specific things. Tables, chairs, sofas from the sets of Dean Martin movies littered the living room. Posters, and photographs, all signed, were on the walls, And then there were the tchotchkes – ashtrays, barware, even an ice cube tray that had been the center of Peri's first murder case.

She wanted to get a closer look at the damage, but she wasn't certain if the police would let her past the barricade. She knew almost everyone in the Placentia Police Department. Peering at all the uniforms, she was hoping to see someone who didn't just view her as an over-snoopy private investigator.

All I can do is try, she thought. The worst they can do is say no.

The tall blonde adjusted her ball cap over her ponytail and approached the officers. She spotted Officer Chou on his phone. He was always very courteous. She caught his eye and he motioned her over.

"Hey, Peri," he said after he ended his call. "I was just calling Detective Carlton."

She smiled. If Chou couldn't let her pass, Skip Carlton might. For one thing, he was a reasonable man. For another, they had been dating for ten years. But why was he needed on the scene?

"For a house fire?"

"House fire's not the problem. The body inside is." Officer Chou looked worried. "I'm assuming it's Benny."

"No." She shook her head. "I happen to know he's out of town this week. It's Dean Martin's birthday, and he went with Phil and Nancy Nickels to some town in Ohio. Dino's birthplace and all that."

* * *

It's now your turn. I'm going to go have some coffee, start a load of laundry and take a nap.

What's new with you?

Just a brief check-in today to share a couple of things:

1. The third mystery is officially finished. Okay, it's the first draft, but it's written, like, all the way to THE END. The angels sang and the heavens wept tears of joy. I should just know, after three mysteries, that the last 20,000 words are a bitch. There's no nicer way to word it, kids. They usually manage to stretch themselves out to 30,000 at least. I feared I was coming in a little short on this story, at about 68,000 words. Final total was over 76,000.

But I like it. I really like the way it ended. Uber cool, and I say this as a person who really hates every ending in every book she's ever read or written. I'm now sitting back and wondering about the pacing, but I'm not going to open the file again for at least three weeks. It has to age a little, without getting rotten.

By the by, I still don't have a good title for it. Let's work on that, shall we?

Finishing that one means I get to start on my Snoopy memoir, which I'm super excited about. I did write about 10,000 words on that one, but I think I want to go in a different direction. For a writer, that doesn't necessarily mean I'll throw everything away. I'll probably just rearrange it.

2. I finally settled on the logo for my very own self-publishing company. I really didn't plan on being such an independent girl. I searched for an agent/publisher and got lots of nice feedback. No "you need to go back to Grammar School, Missy" letters. I just never got a contract. So, oops, let's put it on Amazon and see what happens.

Now I've surrendered. My books will be published under Dancing Corgi Press. Here's my logo:

Joe Felipe designed it. Love it. Soon you'll be able to look for the union label, so to speak.

That's all the news that's fit to print these days. What's happening in your world?

Who is the animal here?

I just finished reading "a big little life" by Dean Koontz. It's a memoir of his golden retriever, Trixie. Let me first say that Dean Koontz is such a huge name, he does not need me to plug anything he does. Secondly, I received this book when I went to the Fullerton Library to hear him speak. He was supposed to sign books after his talk, but had to leave instead, so he pre-autographed 200 copies of this book and gave them to us.

So I love him.



Not Trixie

Now that's out of the way, the book is an unabashedly sentimental look at his first dog-love. Trixie sounds like she was indeed, one of a kind, although I'd say that each dog is unique to the person who owns and loves them. She was remarkably smart, calm, and well-behaved.

I'm not sure what I'd do with a dog like that.

Mr. Koontz takes most of a chapter to argue that we are justified to anthropomorphize our dogs. He gives examples of their memory skills, their displays of happiness, sadness, fear, and hate, and even their acts of heroism to prove his point.

Also not Trixie

As a writer, I'm happy to see animals as more than, well, animals. If you've ever seen my corgi, Duffy, lay in his crate and roll his eyes, you'd know dogs can pout. Here's the thing: I don't know how we don't anthropomorphize animals. We are humans, looking at non-human things, trying to understand them. We must ascribe human characteristics - we don't have any other language but our own.

For example, my neighborhood has been taken over by mockingbirds. There are four pairs on our street who came to build their nests, have a few babies, and then fly off to who knows where. While they are nesting, they are incredibly aggressive birds, defending their turf against all comers.

They harassed me for an entire week. Each time I stepped out of the front door, the female would hop out on our roof and chirp. This would bring the male out, to strafe me. He never actually nailed me, but I could feel the wind from his wings as he flapped toward me to try to intimidate me. He was pretty convincing.

How could I not see this in human eyes? I imagined the female bird saying, "Harold! Har-OLD! The giant is out!"

"I'm coming, Dear," he chirps back, then screams at me. "Scat! Scat, you giant! My nest! MY nest!"

Seriously not Trixie

In my world, Duffy pouts, Spazz the golden retriever has the memory of a goldfish, Snoopy (my horse) is an equine Goofy, and Katie the cat believes we are idiots to bring dogs into the house. And don't get me started on my mare, Frostie. But maybe it's because I am a writer.

Do your pets have personalities? Or are they "just animals"?

Levitation

It's a quick post today, just because I don't want to keep checking in on the blog and seeing such a somber remembrance. I don't want to forget, but I do get rather emotionally exhausted everytime I think about last weekend and the horror.

I don't know about you, but I need a little levity. Here's some.



This was back in the days when SNL was funny. Too bad you kids missed it.