Tag: bears

Traveling, traveling

For those of you who like to to join me in my occasional voyages across the internet, today I am at Adventures in YA Publishing, discussing how to write correctly. (Spoiler: I don’t really have an answer.)

In other news, it has been warm, then cold, then warm, then cold here. It’s a race to see if we can feed out the last of the birdseed before the bears appear. The daffodils have been growing off and on all winter, while the chickadees have been telling us it’s spring for about a month now. I picked a fine year to try snow tires for the first time ever.

Be well. Tell me something happy–I would dearly love to hear it.

No bad news

It is March, and it is cold. I have no dry socks at the moment, and the heat is gone from my tea. The snow piles around the house are tall enough that I can stand on them and pat the roof as I work on the ice in the gutters.

The only proper response is to shed the socks, reheat the tea, and listen to this song, inserting “snow and cold” in the place of “bad news.”

Spring is gathering her energy. It won’t be long now. Dream of the wild, of foxes barking outside of open windows, of bears sniffing the air, their stomachs rumbling.

Not long at all.

Late July, 2014

Isn’t summer supposed to be lazy? Slow, relaxing, full of lemonade and good books and camping?

Apparently not.

This summer offers up driving and not sleeping enough and everything breaking–holy carp, everything I lay a hand on or live beneath or even think about breaks this summer. The plus side to it: I secretly enjoy broken things that prevent me from being able to use my computer to connect with the outside world from home. Only that lack of connections puts a damper on things like, oh, blog posts, for example.

How am I managing this post? The library, of course. I’ve been touring local libraries, depending on where life takes me. This one has plugs built in to the tables, which is brilliant if you have a sad little netbook battery that no longer wants to hold a charge (see–everything breaks). It has very high ceilings, and portraits of dour white people, and never as many patrons as I think it should. This morning, it is quiet, and in a moment I’ll be getting back to work.

The other thing about this summer? The wilds have come to call on us. Moose in the pond. Bear trying to strike up a conversation during dog walks. A lone hummingbird diligently milking the flowers outside the bedroom window. I suspect they have meetings in the early morning where they discuss the situation on our road. “Truth is,” the moose might say, “There’s a lot of breakage going on there. I can see it through the windows. I think it’s safe to move in closer.”

Another thing? My thyroid is not trying to kill me. That’s always a good thing.

The last thing? Throughout the spring and summer I agonize over turtles. They cross the highway everywhere around here, and they are killed in catastrophic numbers. I was driving a few weeks ago with too many fast cars behind me, and a very big truck coming toward me, and a turtle making a break for the other side of the road. I couldn’t stop to get it; I never would have made it in front of the truck. I was heartbroken about it, and dreaded turning back and finding the aftermath.

There was none. The turtle made it. The truck must have stopped, and the stopped truck must have made others stop, and this one time the turtle made it. I felt like the Doctor in the episode where he jumps wildly about after managing to save everyone from a medical accident and shouts “Everyone lives! Just this once, everyone lives!”

I hope your summer is going well.